President Biden announced Wednesday that Russia freed former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed from detention, as Moscow said it arranged a prisoner swap to secure the return of pilot Constantine Yevtushenko, who had been jailed on U.S. drug charges.
“Today, we welcome home Trevor Reed and celebrate his return to the family that missed him dearly,” Biden said in a statement. “Trevor, a former U.S. Marine, is free from Russian detention.”
Biden did not reference a prisoner swap in his statement but said “the negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry, in a post on Telegram from spokeswoman Sakharov Z minutes earlier, announced that “as a result of a lengthy negotiation process,” Reed was “exchanged for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an American court in 2010.”
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons website listed Yaroshenko as “not in [BOP] custody.”
Reed’s family confirmed his release in a statement Wednesday, thanking Biden and saying his actions “may have saved Trevor’s life.”
“Today, our prayers have been answered and Trevor is safely on his way back to the United States,” it said.
Reed was sentenced to nine years in prison in July 2020 for endangering the “life and health” of Russian police officers after a drunken night out in Moscow a year earlier. He denied any wrongdoing.
In recent weeks, Reed’s family and U.S. lawmakers have renewed calls for his release as his parents said his health was worsening. U.S. lawmakers and diplomats have denounced his sentence, and the ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, described the evidence used to convict Reed as “ridiculous.”
Family of Trevor Reed, Marine Corps veteran jailed in Russia, pushes for release as health declines
Yaroshenko, a former Russian pilot, was serving a 20-year prison sentence at the Danbury, Conn., federal prison for conspiracy to bring drugs into the United States. He was picked up by authorities in Liberia and turned over to DEA officials, who sent him to the United States. His attorneys argued he had been entrapped by the DEA.
In 2010, Yaroshenko had met with two men about transporting large shipments of cocaine from South America into Liberia and then on to other destinations, including the United States, according to court documents. They were confidential sources for a long-running undercover Drug Enforcement Administration operation.