US officials confirmed Wednesday that former US Marine Trevor Reed has been traded in a priosner swap for a Russian citizen, Reuters first reported.
Konstantin Yaroshenko, a convicted Russian drug trafficker who was serving out a 20-year sentence in the United States, was released after a lengthy negotiation process, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova also confirmed on her Telegram channel.
Mr Reed, a 30-year-old from Texas, was handed a nine-year jail sentence in 2019 after being found guilty in a Russian court of endangering the lives of two police officers while drunk in Moscow.
The parents of the ex-Marine, Paula and Joey Reed, had for months been running an aggressive public campaign to pressure the Biden administration to do more to bring their son back to the US.
The charges brought against the Texas native have been categorically denied by his family as being valid, while top political figures in Washington, such as John Sullivan, the US ambassador to Russia, had described the evidence being used against the former marine as “flimsy and preposterous”.
Paula and Joey Reed had met with Joe Biden as recently as last month, when they managed to secure a 30-minute sitdown with the US president to discuss the work his administration was doing to bring Mr Reed home.
For months, the pair have been raising the flag about their son’s detainment and his deteriorating health condition.
In December, the family reported that Mr Reed had been exposed to a cellmate who at the time was positive for tuberculosis. They claimed that their son did not receive proper testing, despite his health beginning to visibly worsen.
He spent 10 days in hospital and was returned to his prison cell in March, his Mordovian lawyer, the region where he’s being held in Russia, confirmed at the time.
Shortly after being returned to the prison, his lawyer and family confirmed that the ex-Marine had been engaged in a hunger strike “to protest being sent back to solitary while injured and having TB”.
Last month’s hunger strike marked the second occasion that Mr Reed had engaged in that kind of protest.
Last year, he was protesting rights abuses, but was forced to call it off nearly a week later after having lost too much weight.
