And Max Seddon, the director of the British Financial Times’ Moscow bureau, published the video of the exchange, on his Twitter account.
The operation included Trevor Reed, a former US Marine, and Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko.
The video was also published by the account of the Turkish pro-government newspaper, Daily Sabah, and what confirms the authenticity of the video is that Reid was wearing the same clothes in which he appeared while boarding a small plane at a Russian airport.
The video began with a clip of Yaroshenko exiting a small plane, and with him were people whose faces were hidden, and it seemed that they were members of the American or Turkish security forces.
In a subsequent snapshot, Reid was seen walking with a number of people, who are likely to be from the Russian or Turkish security.
Finally, the exchanges took place, as the two advanced with security personnel and appeared in one place, and each of them boarded the plane that brought him back to his country freely after years of imprisonment.
The prisoner exchange scene sounded like a movie reminiscent of the exchange of hostages between gangs.
Some believe that the implementation of the prisoner exchange process in this way reflects a great lack of trust between the two countries, as one of them was not reassured until after she saw her citizen and confirmed his identity before releasing what was in her hand.
In the past, prisoner exchanges took place between countries, and many of them were not required to take place in the same place.
However, the Associated Press says that the deal was very unusual because it came in conjunction with the Russian war in Ukraine, which brought relations between Moscow and Washington to their lowest level in decades.
Officials did not specify the location of the exchange, but in the hours before that, commercial flight trackers identified a Russian Federal Security Service plane bound for Ankara, Turkey, according to the Associated Press.
Moscow says that Reid assaulted an officer while the troops were transporting him to a police station after he was drunk, and he was sentenced to 9 years in prison, which his country asserts was “unfairly imprisoned.”
In contrast, Washington says that Yaroshenko is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Connecticut for conspiring to smuggle cocaine to the United States, after his arrest in Liberia in 2010, and his subsequent extradition to the United States.
Russia has sought to get its citizen back for years, while also rejecting pleas from high-ranking US officials to release Reid, who was approaching his 1,000th day in prison, and his health has finally deteriorated, his family says.
Commenting on the operation, US President Joe Biden stressed that the negotiations that led to the release of former US marine Trevor Reid imprisoned in Russia in exchange for a Russian prisoner in America required “difficult decisions.”
Biden said, according to the agency, “Agence France Presse”: “The negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”
“His safe return is testament to the priority my administration places on bringing Americans hostage and unjustly detained abroad home,” he added.
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