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BREAKINGBREAKING,
The prisoner swap took place on Wednesday as a result of a lengthy negotiation process, the foreign ministry says.
Russia’s foreign ministry has said it has exchanged Trevor Reed, a former United States marine held in a Russian prisonfor its citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was serving a 20-year sentence in the US on drug charges.
The prisoner swap took place on Wednesday as the result of a lengthy negotiation process, foreign ministry spokewoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel.
The White House also confirmed Reed’s release, with President Joe Biden saying in a statement that Reed “is free from Russian detention.”
“I heard in the voices of Trevor’s parents how much they’ve worried about his health and missed his presence,” Biden said. “And I was delighted to be able to share with them the good news about Trevor’s freedom.”
He added the negotiations for Reed’s release “required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”
The US president did not directly name Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who was serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the US. He was arrested in Liberia.
Reed had been arrested in the summer of 2019 after Russian authorities said he assaulted an officer in Moscow during a night of heavy drinking. He was later sentenced to nine years in prison, though his family has maintained his innocence and the US government has described him as unjustly detained.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari said that the Russian foreign ministry confirmed that Reed, who had launched a hunger strike in March, is “now on his way home”.
“Reed was arrested in 2019 and charged with assaulting and endangering the life of a police officer here in Moscow,” she said. “He was given a sentence of nine years in 2020, which is close to the maximum sentence of 10 years he could have got.”
In a statement, the Reed family thanked President Joe Biden “for making the decision to bring Trevor home” as well as other administration officials and Bill Richardson, the former US 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.
Reed was one of several Americans known to be held by Russia, including WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was detained in February after authorities said a search of her bag revealed a cannabis derivative, and Michigan corporate security executive Paul Whelan, who is being held on espionage-related charges his family says are bogus. It was unclear what if any impact Wednesday’s action might have on their cases.
In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said his administration “will not stop until Paul Whelan and others join Trevor in the loving arms of family and friends.”
Reed’s release comes after a rare private meeting with Biden and administration officials last month. They had stood weeks earlier along his motorcade route during a presidential visit to Texas in hopes of attracting his attention, then later demonstrated outside the White House to ask for a meeting.
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