Former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia for violence, was exchanged Wednesday for a Russian pilot who has been imprisoned in the United States since 2010, a prisoner exchange reminiscent of the Cold War .
On April 27, after a long negotiation process, Trevor Reed […] was exchanged for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a US court in 2011, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the Telegram.
Referring to this exchange, US President Joe Biden said he had to accept difficult decisions to achieve the liberation of the former soldier.
His safe return is a testament to the priority my administration places on the repatriation of Americans who have been hostage and wrongfully detained abroad.he said.
Footage of the Russian television broadcast of Trevor Reed, dressed in black and carrying a large bag, boarding a plane.
His father Joey Reed told the American channel CNN that the former soldier was transferred this week to Moscow, then boarded a plane to Turkey.
” The American plane stopped next to the Russian plane and they simultaneously crossed the two prisoners, as in the movies. “
Trevor Reed, 30, was sentenced in July 2020 to nine years in prison for drunken assault on two police officers called to the scene of a party in Moscow. He denied the attack and denounced a case Politics against the background of Russian-American tensions.
Konstantin Yaroshenko was arrested in May 2010 in Liberia by American secret service agents. Accused of drug trafficking in connection with the Colombian FARC, he was taken to the United States and then sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A plane from Ankara with Mr. Yaroshenko aboard landed around 8:30 am local time in Sochi, a Russian seaside resort on the Black Sea coast, according to the Interfax agency.
The exchange of prisoners between Moscow and Washington was not hindi impact on relations between the two countries, underlined by an American official.
Imprisoned in a penal colony in Mordovia, 500 km from Moscow, Trevor Reed staged a hunger strike in November 2021 to protest against his conditions of detention.
His lawyer, Sergei Nikitenkov, said he had been placed in solitary confinement several times and that the prison administration had not sent him the letters he had received. He did not seek the president’s pardon, the lawyer told Interfax on Wednesday.
A liberation negotiated for a very long time
Konstantin Yaroshenko’s lawyer Alexei Tarasov called him a christmas miracle his release, adding that the exchange was under negotiation in the long run and that the health of the pilot, in his fifty, leaving a lot to be desired.
US President Joe Biden has vowed to do everything to free Trevor Reed and other Americans wrongly detained in Russia, and the hypothesis of exchanging prisoners was regularly raised, especially before the meeting of Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva in June 2021.
The president of Russia was then open to such a possibility, adding that he had a full list of Russians imprisoned in American prisons.
Among the most cited names is that of Paul Whelan, a Canadian-American who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for espionage and claims his innocence. On the Russian side is the famous arms trafficker Viktor Bout, who was arrested in Thailand in 2008 and served a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
Prisoner exchanges were frequent between Moscow and the West until the end of the Cold War in 1991 and never completely stopped, especially since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
They are often concerned with spies, as in 2010, when 10 members of a Russian network (illegal agents operating under false American identities) arrested by the FBI were exchanged for two Russians working for the CIA and British services, as well as to a researcher. .
Source: Radio-Canada
