SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Pavel Butorin awoke every day to an Excel spreadsheet on his phone that he had formulated to track the days his wife had spent in a Russian prison. Days turned to a month. A month turned to two, then three, then four.

All the while, Butorin, 52, waged an advocacy and media campaign pushing for the release of his wife — Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist at the U.S.-funded, editorially independent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — talking with lawyers, collaborating with free press, pressuring government officials for information and action to get Kurmasheva home.

That campaign is over. Kurmasheva, 47, was among 24 people freed this month in the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War, an exchange that included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Washington Post contributing columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza and Marine veteran Paul Whelan.

Four days later, Butorin, Kurmasheva and their two daughters were at an Army hospital in Houston participating in a government program designed to help hostages decompress and reintegrate into society. On Aug. 5, Butorin showed off the day counter — nine months and 11 days — a sign that while the political imprisonment of Kurmasheva, Gershkovich and Whelan is over, they are only beginning to deal with its ramifications. Two former hostages and hostage advocates said that they will have to grapple with a “new normal,” their lives forever altered by becoming geopolitical pawns during rising tension between the United States and Russia and as “hostage diplomacy” becomes more commonplace.

Almar Latour, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, said government officials did “a remarkable job” getting Gershkovich and the other prisoners back to the United States and that “we should respect that moment full of joy and accomplishment.” But in the long term, Latour said he thinks that lawmakers and officials should hurt countries who engage in hostage diplomacy to discourage them from doing it in the first place.

“We should find ways to punish countries that have turned this into an industry … to fight the phenomenon of hostage taking,” he said.

Diane Foley, whose son James was abducted by Islamic State militants in 2012 and beheaded on camera 21 months later, warned earlier this year that, while the U.S. officials’ approach to hostage taking has improved since her son’s death, they need to get better as hostile countries increasingly see kidnapping Americans as a way to gain leverage over the United States.

“It’s a real threat to our national security,” Foley told The Post in March. “We still have a lot of work in front of us.”

Trapped in Russia

The first sign of what would become Kurmasheva’s 14-month ordeal came on June 2, 2023, minutes before she was about to board a plane in Russia on her way back home to the Czech Republic. She had been visiting her elderly mother for two weeks in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, about 500 miles east of Moscow. When she got back to Prague, she and Butorin planned to vacation with the girls at a house she had booked on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Instead, Russian authorities seized Kurmasheva’s Russian and American passports and her iPhone, effectively trapping her in the country, under accusations that she had failed to disclose her American citizenship to the Russian government. She was placed under house arrest at her mother’s home. Butorin and Kurmasheva decided not to tell the girls, thinking it was a bureaucratic slip that they could quickly resolve by paying a $100 fine.

A week later, when it was clear that a quick resolution wasn’t going to happen, they told the girls that their mother would have to stay in Russia for the foreseeable future. She remained under house arrest as Russian authorities seemingly did everything they could to draw out the proceedings concerning an administrative violation, Butorin said.

Then, on Oct. 18, authorities knocked on Kurmasheva’s mother’s door and arrested her, charging her with failing to register herself as a foreign agent. Before they took her away, Kurmasheva sent an audio message to her husband: “They’re taking me to the investigative committee. My lawyer has been informed.” Outside of televised court proceedings, it would be the last time he’d hear her for voice for more than nine months.

Word got out after authorities leaked footage of Kurmasheva’s perp walk, which got picked up by Russian media and went viral. While Butorin held off on informing the girls, the eldest, 16-year-old Bibi, got a text from a friend while at Starbucks telling her that a Radio Free Press/Radio Liberty journalist had been arrested. Bibi put two and two together and figured out it was her mother. By the time Butorin got home to greet his two daughters, they already knew.

That started more than 10 months of anguish and advocacy. Butorin said he’s coped by running, watching Bibi and his younger daughter, 13-year-old Miriam, play guitar and reviving his hobby of painting. (He’s working on one of Alsu based on a photograph of her taken during a Russian court hearing.) He also limited his communication to people who were of “practical value” in his pursuit to free Kurmasheva — liaisons to U.S. government officials, members of Congress, press freedom advocates.

“What I didn’t want was pity,” he said. “Like, if there were people just sobbing or expressing pity, after awhile, I just stopped responding to that. I had to remain focused.”

On July 22, news broke that three days earlier she had been convicted of Russia’s wartime fake-news law, which bans broadcasting or posting any information about the war in Ukraine other than official propaganda, and sentenced to 6½ years in prison.

Hope for a deal

Butorin and his daughters were in D.C. on vacation to give themselves a sense of normalcy. Nevertheless, they were also squeezing in media interviews and meetings with U.S. government officials, members of Congress and press freedom advocates — what he called “his usual rounds.”

Then, “a few days” before the prisoner exchange, he got a call from the Biden administration inviting him and the girls to the White House on Aug. 1, without saying why. The three of them figured it must be a positive development, because officials wouldn’t invite them, especially the girls, to the White House to deliver bad news.

“That gave us hope,” he said.

Then Kurmasheva’s lawyer told Butorin that he had gone to the infamous SIZO-2 prison in Kazan to visit her but was informed she hadn’t been there for several days. Butorin’s hope grew.

Uncertain of what would result from the Aug. 1 meeting at the White House, Butorin didn’t cancel their return trip to Europe. He and the girls were scheduled to fly from Dulles International Airport on the evening of Aug. 3 to Warsaw to attend a Taylor Swift concert for which Butorin had bought VIP tickets more than a year in advance.

But eventually it became clear there was no way they would make it back in time.

As they approached the White House the morning of Aug. 1, they ran into some of the other hostage families. Butorin figured, “Okay, it’s happening,” but still didn’t know it was happening that day.

Butorin, his daughters and the families of Gershkovich, Whelan and Vladimir Kara-Murza — a Russian journalist, author and opposition politician who holds U.S. permanent residency and who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for columns published in The Washington Post — went into the Oval Office where President Joe Biden was waiting.

Biden broke the news: U.S. officials had brokered a deal in which 24 people were freed in an exchange of prisoners held in seven countries — Russia and Belarus on one side, and the United States, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Norway on the other. Their four family members were among them and would soon be flying from Ankara, Turkey, where the swap had taken place, back to the United States.

Then, a surprise. Biden ushered the families closer to the Resolute Desk: “We’re going to call,” he told them. As they waited, having been briefed on the concert situation, Biden joked with girls about missing the concert but said there were more important things than Taylor Swift right now. Bibi and Miriam, who’d just finished sobbing over missing the concert, exchanged a skeptical glance as Butorin somewhat jokingly warned the president he was entering dangerous territory.

Then, the call went through. The first voice they heard was Gershkovich’s. Then it was Kurmasheva’s turn. The girls spoke first.

“Selam eni!” Bibi said, or Tatar for “Hello, mom!”

Kurmasheva replied, “Selam qyzym,” or “Hello, my dear girl.”

“I’m so happy. We’ll see each other very soon,” she added, including Miriam in the conversation.

It was the first time they had heard Kurmasheva outside of televised Russian court hearings. Her voice was joyous but restrained, Butorin said.

“Eni, we’re in the Oval Office,” Bibi said, mostly switching to English.

“Yeah!” Miriam added.

Butorin piped up: “I’m here, too.”

“I love you,” Kurmasheva said. “Guys, I love you. See you soon.”

“Eni, bye!” Bibi said.

Miriam: “We love you so much.”

“Bye, see you soon,” Kurmasheva said.

Then, she was gone.

Waking up from a nightmare

Butorin and the girls returned that afternoon to their friend’s house in Northwest where they were staying, heading back to the White House that evening. Around 9 p.m., the families took a bus to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. They spent about an hour in a waiting room swapping stories and watching on radar as the plane approached the runway. It was around then that Butorin started to feel jittery.

“I had that feeling of standing there on the tarmac like, ‘Am I waking up from a nightmare right now?’” he said. Then it turned to joy: “I can compare it to the days where our children were born. This is the same kind of feeling,” he said.

They were ushered outside to the tarmac. Butorin and other family members walked past people standing behind barriers and lined up in a receiving line behind Biden and Harris. The plane landed, and its door opened.

Butorin watched Whelan come down the jet’s stairs while saluting the president. Then Gershkovich. Finally, he saw his wife. She, too, greeted Biden and Harris, with whom she started chatting. Then Harris ushered her toward her family, saying, “Go, go.”

Bibi and Miriam ran to their mother. They wrapped each other in an embrace. Butorin wasn’t far behind. Miriam was sobbing.

“I can’t stop touching you,” Miriam told her mother.

Butorin started bawling, too.

Then, the former hostages and their families boarded a different plane — this one bound for Texas, where they were taken to Brooke Army Medical Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston. Since then, they’ve been participating in the Post-Isolation Support Activities program, which is designed to help recently released hostages to decompress and reintegrate into society.

Predictability and control

Support staff from the PISA program met Kurmasheva and the other hostages as they got off the airplane at the military base in San Antonio around 11:30 p.m., before escorting them to Brooke, where medical staff was waiting to assess them.

The process is a “medical marathon” of tests for conditions like bronchitis, hepatitis and pneumonia, as well a mental health screening, said Jose Pereira, former president of Houston-based oil company Citgo who went through the program in 2022 after he and five other Citgo employees were held hostage in Venezuela for five years. Doctors gave Pereira, who had fainted about a year before his release and then spent three days in a coma, two MRIs.

“They scan your body completely,” he said.

Once they’re released from the hospital, the former hostages are taken to “distinguished visitors quarters” to start decompression with PISA specialists and military psychologists versed in Search, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training.

Steve Holland, a personnel recovery specialist with U.S. Army South, which runs the program, says he tells hostages they’re like bottles of Dr Pepper that have been shaken up. If they open up immediately, they’ll explode all over everything and everyone around them. But if they ease into it slowly, they let that pressure escape gradually until things are back to something approaching normalcy.

Jason Rezaian, the former Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, attended a nascent version of PISA at a military facility in Germany in 2016 after he was freed from 544 days of imprisonment in Iran on charges of espionage.

By the time he was released, Rezaian had been threatened with execution, dismemberment and life imprisonment; told that people had abandoned him; and endured seven weeks in solitary confinement. The entire time, his captors kept the lights on 24 hours per day to deprive him of sleep. He had no line to the outside world, no way to defend himself.

“It’s designed to make you feel like a caged animal … and in some ways, it works,” he said.

And then, on Jan. 16, 2016, he was suddenly free, the same day the United States implemented a nuclear pact with Iran.

Rezaian’s instinct was to go home as quickly as possible to spend time with family and friends, catch a baseball game, eat his favorite meal or whatever popped into his head. But he knew that he needed psychological help.

“I understood pretty well I had been put through the wringer and couldn’t calmly sit there and move to the next phase of my life,” he said.

PISA staff try to give the participants what they had been stripped of in captivity — predictability and control, Holland said. They start by giving them simple choices: What food do you want to eat? Then they move to more complicated decisions: So-and-so wants to contact you, yes or no? And they do role playing of likely scenarios participants will face once they leave the base - such as strangers approaching them to wish them well or to say something mean. The goal is to give them tools to handle their new lives in a healthy way.

Rezaian and Pereira said the government psychologists encouraged them to remember and recount what happened to them, to talk about what happened in their own words. For 18 months, others had told Rezaian’s story for him — Iranian officials, American officials, the media, he said, adding that sometimes those accounts were inaccurate. When he got to Germany, Rezaian was given a digital voice recorder and told it was his to do with as he pleased, along with around-the-clock access to psychologists who would listen.

“This was my first opportunity to start shaping the narrative myself,” he said.

Rezaian said those professionals also coached him on being an accidental celebrity. Reporters were already clamoring for interviews, something the PISA program helped keep at bay. But once he left the cocoon of the military base and moved around in public, he was bombarded by strangers. Almost all of them were well-wishers who wanted to say something encouraging, but it was “very overwhelming.”

“Because you’re part of the public realm now, people feel they own some part of your time,” he said.

‘The wheel keeps spinning’

Liz Cathcart, executive director of Hostage US, a nonprofit that helps recover and reintegrate wrongfully detained prisoners, said that newly freed hostages immediately have to deal with the wreckage of bureaucratic lives that nosedived while they were imprisoned: expired drivers’ licenses, closed bank accounts, unpaid credit cards and tax bills.

“The wheel keeps spinning on life while you’re away,” Cathcart said.

Some effects of captivity take months or even years to emerge.

Only after Pereira left PISA did he discover two of his PTSD triggers: metallic clangs that sounded like guards locking jail doors and people talking too loudly, which resembled his interrogators constantly getting in his face and screaming in what he described as “psychological torture.” About six months after he returned home, Pereira’s wife was driving them somewhere when she began to talk loudly enough to trigger him. Instantly, Pereira’s heart started racing and he became short of breath. He went off.

“I begin to scream like crazy. It was so hard how I was screaming that my wife got scared,” he said, adding that she had to call first responders for help.

But Pereira, who still goes to therapy once a week, said his mental health has improved, in large part because he’s used the tools that PISA gave him.

Butorin said that Kurmasheva’s PISA experience included a lot of counseling, talking with psychologists in “informal chats.” She and Whelan traded prison stories about what they ate, slang they picked up and abbreviations - “a little bit of code” - that meant nothing to Butorin. And they laughed at having survived a horrible situation.

But imprisonment has clearly changed her, Butorin said. She’s lost weight and appears “fragile.” Before being detained, she was very outgoing and made friends with anyone and everyone upon entering the room. “I think now she has become a more cautious communicator, because you can’t trust anybody in a prison cell,” he said.

During her six days at PISA, Kurmasheva spent a lot of time with her daughters, celebrating Miriam’s 13th birthday with cake and later going as a family to a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio’s fashionable Pearl District, Butorin said. As they dined, he recorded his wife eating her first bite of avocado in more than a year. Her eyes rolled back in pleasure.

“That’s not something they serve in Russian prisons,” he said.

The family is back in Prague, and big questions about Kurmasheva’s future remain. Butorin doesn’t know how long it will take her to physically and psychologically recover. He doesn’t know when she’ll go back to work or if her employer will accommodate her absence. He doesn’t know if she’ll report on Russia again or perhaps even go back there.

What he does know is that he and the girls will be supporting and caring for Kurmasheva as they ease back into family life and she figures out her future.

“I just hope,” he said, “that she comes out as a stronger person.”