Few things should be more important for a democracy than human life; and with this exchange, the U.S. and German governments have saved 16 lives from the hell of Putin’s Gulag. Whatever else President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be remembered for years from now, they will be remembered for this.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and anti-Nazi resistance fighter, identified stupidity as a greater threat than evil itself.