Ex-soldier for drug smugglers
Washington and Moscow exchange prisoners
4/27/2022, 6:54 p.m
Former US soldier Trevor Reed is in a Russian prison for attacking two police officers. Now the ex-marine can return to his home country. For this, Washington released the Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenkoin early from prison.
The US and Russia exchanged two prisoners amid the Ukraine war. Russia released former US soldier Trevor Reed, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for attacking police officers in Moscow, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday. In return, the Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug smuggling, was released, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
“We welcome Trevor Reed back home and celebrate his return to his family who have missed him dearly,” Biden said. At the same time, the US President emphasized: “The negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”
Konstantin Yaroshenko was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the United States.
(Photo: IMAGO/ITAR-TASS)
At the end of March, after a meeting with the parents of the approximately 30-year-old Reed, Biden promised to work for his release. The detention was a “nightmare” for the former marines. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was “happy that Trevor Reed has been released and reunited with his family after years of unlawful detention by the Russian government.”
However, a US government representative emphasized that the prisoner swap would have no effect whatsoever on the fundamental relations between Washington and Moscow in the Ukraine war. “This represents no – zero – change in our approach to the shocking violence in Ukraine.” Talks with Russia about the exchange of prisoners were “strictly” limited to this topic.
Reed is said to have drunkenly attacked two police officers who had been called to a party in Moscow in 2019. Last summer he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Reed had pleaded not guilty and said he couldn’t remember anything. He described the process as politically motivated.
Reed was imprisoned in a penal colony about 500 kilometers south-east of Moscow and last November went on a two-week hunger strike to protest his prison conditions. Konstantin Yaroshenko was arrested in Liberia in West Africa in 2010 and then taken to the United States. He was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug smuggling.