And the Russian Foreign Ministry said, according to what was reported by “Reuters”, that it had exchanged Trevor Reid, a former US marine, who was being held in a Russian prison, with the Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was serving a 20-year prison sentence in the United States for conspiracy to smuggle Cocaine was brought to the United States, after he was arrested in Liberia in 2010, and extradited to the United States.
Russia has sought to get him 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 had recently deteriorated, according to his family.
The spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, said on her channel on the “Telegram” application that the prisoner exchange took place on Wednesday after a lengthy negotiation process.
The two prisoners were exchanged in a European country, and officials did not specify where the exchange took place, except that in the hours before that, commercial flight trackers identified a plane belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service bound for Ankara, Turkey. The United States Bureau of Prisons also updated its website at night to reflect that Yaroshenko is no longer in custody.
As part of the deal, Russia released Trevor Reed, a former Marine from Texas who was arrested in the summer of 2019 after Russian authorities said he assaulted an officer while the troops were taking him to a police station after he was drunk.
Reed was later sentenced to nine years in prison, despite his family’s assertion of his innocence, and the US government said he was “unfairly imprisoned”.
Biden’s comment
For his part, Biden welcomed the release of Reade from the Russian prison, where he had been since 2019.
“Former Marine Trevor has been released from Russian prison,” Biden said.
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