Russia releases US Marine vet as part of prisoner exchange

Poster of U.S. Marine Corps veteran Trevor Reed near the White House

By ERIC TUCKER and MATTHEW LEE

Associated Press

April 27, 2022 Updated 7:36 AM PT

WASHINGTON —

Russia and the United States carried out a dramatic prisoner exchange Wednesday, trading a Marine veteran jailed in Moscow for a convicted Russian drug trafficker serving a long prison sentence in America, a senior U.S. official and the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The surprise deal involving Trevor Reed, an American imprisoned for nearly three years, would have been a notable diplomatic maneuver even in times of peace, but it was all the more extraordinary because it was done as Russia’s war with Ukraine has driven relations between Moscow and Washington to their lowest point in decades.

While the prisoner exchange marked a rare point of agreement, it seemed unlikely to herald any larger breakthrough, with a senior Biden administration official cautioning that the negotiations centered on a “discrete set of prisoner issues” and did not represent a change to the U.S. government’s condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Where we can have discussions on issues of mutual interest, we will try to talk to the Russians and have a constructive conversation without any way changing our approach to the appalling violence in Ukraine,” the official told reporters after the prisoner release.

The exchange took place in Turkey, Reed’s father, Joey Reed, told CNN.

“The American plane pulled up next to the Russian plane and they walked both prisoners across at the same time, like you see in the movies,” he said.

President Biden, who met in Washington with Reed’s parents last month, trumpeted Reed’s release and noted without elaboration that “the negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.” The Russian Foreign Ministry described the exchange as the “result of a long negotiation process.”

Multiple other Americans still remain jailed in Russia, including WNBA star Brittney Griner and Michigan corporate security executive Paul Whelan.

Reed, a 30-year-old former Marine from Texas, was arrested in the summer of 2019 after Russian authorities said he assaulted an officer while being driven by police to a police station following a night of heavy drinking. Reed was later sentenced to nine years in prison, though his family has maintained his innocence and the U.S. government has described him as unjustly detained.

The U.S. agreed to return Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year federal prison sentence in Connecticut for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. after he was arrested in Liberia in 2010 and extradited to the U.S. The Justice Department has described him as “an experienced international drug trafficker” who conspired to distribute thousands of kilograms of cocaine around the world.

A lawyer for Yaroshenko, who last year sought a reduced prison sentence because of his vulnerability to the coronavirus, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Wednesday.

Russia had sought Yaroshenko’s return for years while also rejecting entreaties by high-level U.S. officials to release Reed, who was nearing his 1,000th day in custody and whose health had recently been worsening, according to his family.

A senior U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, described Reed’s case as one of “utmost priority” for the Biden administration, in part because of his health. The official noted that Yaroshenko, whose sentence has now been commuted, had already served the majority of his sentence.

“It was a difficult decision but one that we thought was worth it,” the official said.

Although officials would not say where the transfer took place, in the hours before it happened commercial flight trackers identified a plane belonging to Russia’s federal security service as flying to Ankara, the Turkish capital. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons also updated its website overnight to reflect that Yaroshenko was no longer in custody.

Reed was en route back to the U.S., traveling with Roger Carstens, the U.S. government’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.

“Today, our prayers have been answered and Trevor is on his way back safely to the United States,” Reed’s family said in a statement.

The prisoner swap marks the highest-profile release during the Biden administration of an American deemed wrongly detained abroad and comes even as families of detainees who have met over the last year with administration officials described them as cool to the idea of an exchange.

The U.S. government does not typically embrace such exchanges for fear that it might encourage foreign governments to take additional Americans as prisoners as a way to extract concessions. The U.S. also wants to avoid a potential false equivalency between an unjustly detained American — as U.S. officials believe Reed was — and a properly convicted criminal.

The Reed family thanked Biden “for making the decision to bring Trevor home” as well as other administration officials and Bill Richardson, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who the family said traveled to Moscow in the hours before the Ukraine war began in hopes of securing Reed’s release.

The Reed family had also been working with a consultant, Jonathan Franks, who was involved in other recent high-profile releases, including of Michael White, a Navy veteran freed by Iran in 2020.

The release had no immediate impact on the cases of other Americans held by Russia. Those include Griner, who was detained in February after authorities said a search of her bag revealed a cannabis derivative, and Whelan, who is being held on espionage-related charges that his family says are bogus.

U.S. officials say Whelan was unjustly detained, and Biden said Wednesday that “we won’t stop until Paul Whelan and others join Trevor in the loving arms of family and friends.”

Reed’s parents, Joey and Paula, had demonstrated outside the White House last month in hopes of getting a meeting with Biden.

“We believe that that meeting with the president is what made it happen,” Joey Reed told CNN. “Which is what we had said all along — if we could just speak to the president, he’s that kind of person.”

When he is reunited with his son, Reed said, “I want to hug him and not let him go.”