Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics dispatch. It’s foreign policy Tuesday and I’m your host, Julia Ioffe.

Before diving into the meat of today’s issue—the fascinating postscript to last week’s prisoner swap, which has, at least from the Russian side, been phenomenally absurd—my colleagues Peter Hamby and Tara Palmeri offer two different, equally fascinating points of view on Kamala Harris’s V.P. pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

But first, a note on the tensions in the Middle East…

• The Netanyahu exception: The world continues to wait for Iran to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week. Today, the rocket tit-for-tat continued across the Lebanese-Israeli border, but so far, a third World War has yet to arrive. In fact, it seems most everyone is not interested in starting one. The Biden administration is working to keep the lid on the proverbial pot. Vladimir Putin sent Sergei Shoigu, his former defense minister, who is now secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, to Tehran, where he reportedly encouraged the Ayatollah to keep Israeli civilian casualties to a minimum. (Shoigu also agreed to send Iran the advanced air defense systems it has been asking for. You know what they say: There’s no such thing as a free drone.) For his part, Hassan Nasrallah, head of Iranian proxy Hezbollah, warned that “residents of Haifa should be prepared” but also said that “the nerve-racking anticipation is part of the response.” The Lebanese foreign minister said he’s trying to do what he can to keep Hezbollah reined in.

  The exception seems to be Bibi Netanyahu, who the Biden administration has long feared is intent on dragging the U.S. into a regional war. One Hill Democrat even groused to me that, in this matchup, Iran is a rational actor, while the current Israeli government is decidedly not. That said, few people I’ve spoken to in Washington really think this will escalate into a broader war, but no one wants to publicly dismiss the possibility it only to be proven wrong. It may be hot as hell in Washington, but you must always cover your ass.

• The A.O.C.-Manchin pick: After Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Nice Guy Tim Walz as her running mate this morning, I almost tweeted out something to the effect of: Great, now we can go back to the part of the campaign where no one really cares about V.P. picks. But I thought better of it—always think twice before posting—because while running mates usually fade into the background of a campaign, this cycle’s choices do feel like they matter a little bit more than history might dictate. For J.D. Vance, it’s the downsides: His charisma deficit and weird obsession with “childless cat ladies” have spawned an unrelenting series of negative news cycles for the Trump campaign. Of course, Vance might improve, and he was actually pretty sharp on Tuesday as an attack dog against the Harris campaign, calling Walz a “dangerously liberal extremist” and correctly pointing out that Harris has yet to endure an unscripted moment with the press or voters since becoming the Democratic nominee. But until now, Vance has been a net negative.

  With Walz, meanwhile, Democrats are hoping he’s additive in a way running mates typically are not. That’s because Harris is still ill-defined for much of the country, her campaign mostly just running on vibes—and the fact that she isn’t Joe Biden. As I wrote yesterday about the ongoing Democratic hype cycle, Harris still has work to do to convince independent voters and skeptical voters of color—especially the ones who didn’t go to college—that she’s not an out-of-touch coastal elite. Enter Walz, the genial Midwestern dad slash former teacher who seems like the kind of corn-fed politician the D.N.C. would have drawn up on paper back in the Bush era, when soul-searching Dems were longing for flyover country candidates who could appeal to NASCAR Dads and Walmart Moms. For Chrissake, the guy has his own hotdish recipe, served in the military, hunts pheasants, and can talk about the 4-4 defense he ran as coach of the Mankato West High School football team. This guy is a wet dream straight out of Howard Dean’s long-forgotten “50 State Strategy.” You can bet the Harris digital team is about to bombard your feeds with Walz content.

  So, for people out there with questions about Harris—especially those precious Trump-Biden voters in the Upper Midwest—Walz might make them feel a little more comfortable about the “San Francisco radical” at the top of the ticket. That’s how Walz presents, at least. And for all the talk of Josh Shapiro being able to maybe, maybe deliver Pennsylvania for Harris, I’ve felt for a few weeks now that Walz seemed like a more versatile player across the Electoral College map. Walz is just less of a conventional pol in a suit—not another lawyer!—and more convincing as that nice fella who would spend a Saturday replacing your alternator if you asked. His now-famous attack on MAGA world—“These guys are weird”—worked so well because it just seemed like something a normal person would say.

  Maybe all the heartland authenticity that Walz brings to the ticket just makes Democrats feel confident they can win back voters in purple counties that have drifted to Trump. Maybe he won’t have an effect—again, running mates typically don’t move the needle that much. But one of the remarkable aspects about the Walz pick—and really, about the whole Harris candidacy so far—is that it’s bringing Democrats together in a way we haven’t seen in years. Walz has staked out positions liberal enough to win over A.O.C. and Bernie, and others moderate enough to elicit praise from Terry McAuliffe and Joe Manchin. Democrats right now want to keep the party going, and fundamentally, they want to win. With the Walz pick, Harris is sending a signal that she cares about doing both. —Peter Hamby

• Windows & Walz: Over in Mar-a-Lago, I’m hearing that they are breathing sighs of relief that Harris chose Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, keeping his battleground state and its 19 Electoral College votes—which Trump basically has to win—in play. “We’re super relieved. We did not want Shapiro,” said one Mar-a-Lago denizen. “We didn’t want Mark Kelly, but we’d rather have him than Shapiro. With Walz, this is such a liberal ticket.” Another source in Trumpworld went so far as to describe the feeling as “ebullient,” as they lick their chops and prepare to brand Walz as a radical and a communist. (We’ll see how those two land…)

  Either way, Trump’s team is interpreting Harris’s move as doubling down on her base—a turnout play rather than an attempt to expand the coalition. Trump insiders are also convinced that Harris has hit her high-water mark, and that Walz won’t give her much of a boost. However, a few more sober minds warn that they’re underestimating Walz’s political skills. After all, it was his TV appearances that seem to have won over Harris, according to my partner John Heilemann—a talent that Trump also appreciates. Meanwhile, Vance is gearing up to hit Walz on the Black Lives Matter protests in Minnesota, and they’re preparing for incoming from Walz on abortion. —Tara Palmeri

The news spotlight has since moved on—there’s the potential war between Israel and Iran, there’s Kamala Harris’s new running mate—but I have found the aftermath of the exchange to be as fascinating as the swap itself, especially how it has played out among Russians.

The Kremlin spin is particularly noteworthy. Russian state media outlets were given talking points on how to cover the exchange: emphasize the charges for which Gershkovich, Whelan, and the Russian opposition figures were doing time, while highlighting that the Russians being returned had been working honorably for their Motherland. The F.S.B. helped by providing videos of Gershkovich and Whelan’s arrests, which Russian state TV immediately ran. The videos of the Americans, they said, “once again proves their guilt.” In fact, the videos proved something else: that both Gershkovich and Whelan had been set up by the F.S.B. One of the several videos of Evan meeting a source in Yekaterinburg features audio of him telling this person—whose face is blurred, voice is changed, and who is never identified—that he had specifically asked him to keep certain documents at home. The source brought them anyway, calling them “secret materials.” The Kremlin clearly wanted to show that Gershkovich was procuring information not meant for his eyes, but instead showed that it was the source who was sharing it without having been asked—and was therefore most likely an F.S.B. provocateur.

In Whelan’s case, the released video shows him in the bathroom of his Moscow hotel room. Another man walks in—we can only see him from the back—and hands Whelan something that the American then puts in his pocket. The video then cuts to him handcuffed and sitting on his hotel bed, surrounded by masked, muscly men, as if to say, Q.E.D., he’s guilty. Which is exactly the line that Russian state TV went with, for both Gershkovich and Whelan, leaving unanswered any questions about the contents of the alleged “secret materials” or the identity and motives of these Russian citizens ostensibly passing this information to representatives of a hostile foreign power.

The Russian prisoners who were sent back to Moscow, meanwhile, were treated as heroes. Vladimir Putin, who greeted them on the tarmac, praised them for faithfully keeping their oaths to the Motherland and said they would all receive government medals for their service. It was a confirmation that most if not all of them had, in fact, been agents of the Russian state.

The state, in turn, valorized them, especially Vadim Krasikov, who is rumored to be close to Putin and to have once been one of Putin’s bodyguards. (Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that he was close not to Putin, but to the other bodyguards protecting the Russian president.) Putin, who had been obsessed with getting Krasikov home, implausibly told Tucker Carlson in February that Krasikov had killed a man in a Berlin park on his own initiative, “out of patriotic considerations.” Russian state TV then went even further, waxing poetic about how Krasikov had withstood his interrogations at the hands of the Germans so thoroughly “that he didn’t even give them his name.” He also, according to state TV, refused to seek clemency or a pardon. “As a result, instead of the traditional pardon, Germany had to process this as a deportation of a foreigner,” the Kremlin’s flagship Channel One boasted. It then went on to say that “the portrait of an unbroken Russian” was only accentuated by the helmet German guards placed on Krasikov’s head as they led him to a bus that would take him to the waiting Russian plane.

In all the excitement about these Russian patriots returning home, even Maria Butina made an appearance. (Remember the redhead who penetrated the N.R.A. and G.O.P. circles and was then deported from the U.S.? She is now a member of the Russian Parliament and advocates for the rights of prisoners—in American jails.) “I knew in the depths of my heart that I would never be abandoned,” she told Russian state TV, “because Russians don’t abandon their own.”

As I said on our The Powers That Be podcast, Putin wasn’t really giving anything up with this trade of Russian political prisoners. In fact, he was cleaning house. Now, these dissidents will not be going on hunger strikes in his penal colonies or writing poignant, principled missives from Russian jails, all of which generated headlines in the West and in the independent Russian press (which a large number of Russians in Russia still read and watch). Instead, they are essentially exiles and therefore, in the eyes of most Russians, totally irrelevant. In fact, in his very first interview after his release, Yashin admitted as much. “I genuinely don’t understand how you can be a part of Russian politics while you are outside Russia’s borders,” he told TV Rain. “While I was in jail, I understood that my words, spoken from jail, … had weight. … Of course, I understand that the very same words spoken from abroad … have a lot less weight.”

The West might be hoping that the release of Yashin and other Russian political prisoners will reinvigorate the Russian opposition abroad, but Yashin’s first few days of freedom showed just how thoroughly broken that Russian opposition is—and how silly those dreams are. Yashin’s release was greeted with joy by members of the Russian opposition and the Russian independent press—both of which operate in exile—all of whom tried hard to paper over what they’ve known all along: that this young man, who was once close to Boris Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny, was always their less talented little brother.

Evgeny Feldman, who was Navalny’s campaign photographer, followed Yashin around during his first few days in the free world, and the contrast between Feldman’s two subjects couldn’t have been any clearer. Navalny was a charismatic, dominating presence, and photos of him always reflected that. Even after being poisoned, even during his grueling recovery in Germany, Navalny knew how to cut a strong and inspirational image. Yashin, by contrast, appears small, weak, even pathetic. Here he is shopping for toiletries, here he is giving an interview, here he is catching up with friends. He may look relatable, but in none of these images does he look like a leader anyone would want to follow into battle against Putin. Which is why Putin understood that letting Yashin out of the country would do him zero harm, but why the threat posed by Navalny could only be neutralized by his death.

In fact, in that same TV Rain interview, Yashin committed a grave error, saying that Ukraine should sit down at the negotiating table with Russia—because Ukraine and Russia were losing so many soldiers. The comments put him right in the middle of a debate that has been splitting and convulsing the Russian opposition for the past two years: Are the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine “our boys” who have been duped and swindled into fighting a criminal war, or are they criminals for fighting in a criminal war? Do they deserve our pity or our scorn? At the same time, for Ukrainians, Yashin’s statement just reinforced two tenets to which they’ve clung since at least February 2022. The first: that the war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war imposed on an unwilling Russian population, but the war of all Russians, one which they either tacitly or wholeheartedly support because they are all neo-imperialists. The second: that the Russian opposition is not to be trusted because they are only against Putin, not for Ukraine—a vital distinction.

It was an incredibly efficient way to step in it and alienate large numbers of people in his own natural constituency. Which is why one of the photos Feldman shared with Meduza, an independent Russian news organization, really jumped out at me. It showed one of Yashin’s friends holding up an edition of Le Figaro, the front page of which shows a bloodied Trump just after that assassination attempt went sideways. “Now that’s a political animal,” Yashin said in awe, according to the caption. It seemed very much like the statement of someone who, deep down, knows they are not one.

Julia