Russia and the United States have carried out a dramatic prisoner exchange, trading a Marine veteran jailed in Moscow for a convicted Russian drug trafficker serving a long prison sentence in Danbury Federal Correctional Institute.
The surprise deal involving Trevor Reed, an American jailed for nearly three years, came about as the result of a long negotiation process. The U.S. agreed to return Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year federal prison sentence at Danbury FCI for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. after he was arrested in Liberia in 2010 and extradited to the U.S.
Reed, a 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. He was later sentenced to nine years in prison, though his family has maintained his innocence and the U.S. government described him as unjustly detained and expressed concern about his declining health.
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.
The two prisoners were swapped in a European country. Though 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, Turkey. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons also updated its website overnight to reflect that Yaroshenko was no longer in custody.
Yaroshenko submitted a request for compassionate release to the Warden of Federal Correctional Institute Danbury on April 2, 2020, which the Warden denied on April 23, 2020. The opinion said while it is "undoubtedly correct that close quarters and other prison conditions increase COVID-19 transmission risk," the FCI Danbury facility appears to have effectively contained the virus: There are presently no known COVID-19 cases at the facility and there have been no deaths since the one noted by Yaroshenko in his motion.
