Amid rising tensions between Washington and Moscow, an unexpected diplomatic breakthrough was announced by the US and Russian governments on Wednesday, as the two countries sealed a prisoner swap deal.
The Russian Foreign Ministry announced the exchange of Trevor Reed, a former US Marine sentenced in 2020 to nine years in prison for violence, for Russian citizen Konstantin Yarochenko, a pilot serving a 20-year sentence on cocaine trafficking charges.
Reed’s family and US officials characterized his conviction in Moscow as an “absurd farce”, and the former marine said it was political persecution for having joined the ranks of the US Armed Forces. Relatives confirmed his release and said that they will now be focusing on taking care of the health problems he acquired in prison.
A native of Texas, Reed traveled to Russia three years ago to visit his girlfriend, whom he met online. Shortly before returning to the US, he attended a party outside Moscow and, intoxicated, was taken by local police to a police station. Russian security agents accused him of endangering the lives of police officers. He spent 11 months in prison before being tried and convicted.
Footage on state TV channel Russia 24 showed the former marine being escorted to Vnukovo airport in the capital Moscow, from where he boarded for the US. Reed’s parents said in March that he had started a hunger strike to protest being placed in solitary confinement and not receiving adequate medical care, even though he suspected he had tuberculosis.
The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, for its part, denied that he had the disease or that he had had contact with infected people and described the American’s health as satisfactory.
Yaroshenko is expected to return to his country soon, the Russian pilot’s wife told the Tass news agency. He was arrested in 2010 in Liberia by US secret service agents and accused of organizing an international cocaine smuggling ring.
The prisoner exchange was the result of a long negotiation process, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on a messaging app.
US President Joe Biden said the negotiations required difficult decisions and that much was analyzed before making them. “Reed’s safe return is a testament to the priority my administration places on bringing Americans wrongfully detained or held hostage in other countries,” the Democrat said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a similar tone, said the administration will remain committed to guaranteeing the freedom of US citizens wrongfully detained abroad.
A senior US government official told Reuters news agency that negotiations with Russia were strictly limited to the release of detainees, with no broader diplomatic discussions between the two nations.
Other Americans remain in detention in Russia, such as Paul Whelan, sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage charges during a trial closed to the public, and Brittney Griner, a basketball player arrested in mid-March this year after being seen carrying in her luggage vaporizer cartridges containing a cannabis derivative (marijuana) in oily form.
News of the prisoner swap comes a day after the Biden administration announced the administration’s first pardons, which are expected to release convicted nonviolent drug offenders from prison as part of an effort to bolster its track record on racial justice in a year of midterm elections, when the Democratic Party’s narrow majority in the US legislature will be at stake.
