I'm glad that unjustly imprisoned Americans and Russian dissidents were freed in the deal announced. There are few braver or more admirable people in the world than Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza.
But joy is tempered by the reality that this incentivizes more hostage-taking by Putin and other despots. The motley crew of Russian criminals and spies freed in this exchange are (with one notable exception) not as awful as the Palestinian terrorists the Israelis freed in some of their ill-advised deals. Also, some of those freed by Russia were not initially seized for the purpose of taking hostages (the Westerners were, but the Russians were imprisoned because they opposed Putin). That makes the bad incentives less awful. But it's still a highly problematic dynamic.
In future, we should find better ways to deal with regimes that engage in hostage-taking. If exchanges are done, it should be with enemy assets and personnel specifically seized for that purpose, so the enemy state doesn't gain anything from hostage-taking the wouldn't have had otherwise. But I admit I have not fully thought out how this should work, and an informal post isn't the right place to do so.