NEW YORK. The release of Taylor Dudley, a US Navy veteran who was stopped and arrested in Russia nine months ago and only released yesterday thanks to a mediation carried out by the former governor of New Mexico and ambassador to the UN, is shrouded in a patina of mystery Bill Richardson.
Dudley, 35, from Lansing, Michigan, was arrested by border police in April 2022 after crossing from Poland to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave enclosed between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. He was in Poland attending a music festival and it is not clear why he crossed the border. Dudley’s detention – which the US government did not deem “unlawful” or based on arbitrary and discriminatory motives – had never been widely publicized before yesterday because his family wanted talks for his release to remain confidential. .
The Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a non-profit organization founded by Richardson, has been carrying out the negotiations for about six months, together with the Steve Menzies Global Foundation, Hostage US and the James Foley Foundation, in addition to US diplomats. The former governor has worked extensively to free Americans detained overseas, and he’s center has played a role in securing the release of former Marine Trevor Reed as well. Dudley’s release is not matched by the release of any detainees by the United States. “We worked hard in Moscow and Kaliningrad – says Richardson -, during meetings with Russian officials in which we discussed the cases of Brittney Griner, Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed”.
The basketball champion (sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for possession of marijuana vapes) and the former marine (also sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for assaulting a policeman) were freed in the context of an exchange of prisoners, which took place during the ongoing war in Ukraine. Respectively with Viktor Bout, a Russian citizen sentenced in the USA to 25 years for arms trafficking and with Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot sentenced to twenty years for organizing a trafficking of one hundred million dollars of cocaine in America. Paul Whelan, also a former Marine, remains in Federation prisons, arrested on December 28, 2018 for espionage. On June 15, 2020, he received a sixteen-year prison sentence.
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