Emerson Phillips
American Trevor Reed, a US citizen and former Marine who had been detained in Russia since 2019, was released in a prisoner swap Wednesday and is back in the United States.
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His mother, Paula Reed, tweeted early Thursday:
“It’s been (a) very exciting day for the Reed family. Trevor is back in the USA.”
It brings to an end a nearly three-year ordeal for Reed. In July 2020 he was sentenced to nine years in prison for endangering the “life and health” of Russian police officers in an altercation. Reed and his family have denied the charges against him.
The exchange took place in Turkey on Wednesday, Trevor’s parents previously told CNN.
His release came after months of effort by the US government, officials said, and was particularly urgent given concerns about Reed’s health. It was ultimately secured through a prisoner swap for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko.
Reed’s parents said they spoke to Trevor on the phone on two separate occassions after the exchange.
“The first phone call we got, he did not sound like himself,” Paula Reed said Wednesday evening at a news conference outside their home in Granbury, Texas. She said his spirits seemed better by the time they received a second call from him later in the day: “He still looks terrible, but he sounded better. He sounded more like himself.”
The Reeds said they had also spoken to President Joe Biden on Wednesday and expressed their gratitude.
“I heard in the voices of Trevor’s parents how much they’ve worried about his health and missed his presence,” Biden said in a statement. “And I was delighted to be able to share with them the good news about Trevor’s freedom.”
Biden said he raised the issue of Reed’s release with Russian officials three months ago.
It’s the result of “months and months of hard careful work across the US government” on the matter, a senior administration official said, noting that “the conversations on this particular issue have accelerated recently to get us to this point.”
“Ultimately, those negotiations led the President to have to make a very hard decision with a decision to commute the sentence of Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian smuggler convicted of conspiring to import cocaine,” the senior official said.
Yaroshenko is a Russian pilot who had been detained in Liberia by undercover US Drug Enforcement Agency agents on May 28, 2010, and brought to the US, according to Russian state news agency TASS. He was convicted of drug smuggling in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he had been serving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He has denied the charges against him.
