The Russian Foreign Ministry announced, on Wednesday, that it had released an American prisoner in exchange for another Russian in the United States, whose President Joe Biden welcomed the prisoner exchange process.
And the Russian Foreign Ministry said, according to what was reported by “Archyde.com”, that it had exchanged Trevor Reid, a former US marine, who was being held in a Russian prison, with the Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko.
The Associated Press says that the deal was very exceptional because it came in conjunction with the Russian war in Ukraine, which brought relations between Moscow and Washington to their lowest level in decades.
Moscow says that Reid assaulted an officer while the troops were transporting him to a police station following 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, following 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.
Exchange in Turkey
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 following a lengthy negotiation process.
The two prisoners were exchanged in a European country, and officials did not specify where the exchange took place, but in the hours before that, commercial flight trackers identified a plane belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service bound for Ankara, Turkey, according to the Associated Press.
The United States Bureau of Prisons also updated its website at night to reflect that Yaroshenko is no longer in custody.
Biden’s comment
For his part, Biden welcomed the release of Reid from the Russian prison, where he had been since 2019.
“Former Marine Trevor has been released from Russian prison,” Biden said.
Source: Sky News
