1 of 2 | Greek police officers escorted Alexander Vinnik (R), of Russian nationality, in Dec. 2018 then suspected of running a money laundering operation using bitcoin, before the Greek Supreme Court’s office in Athens. Vinnik has been housed at Alameda County Jail in California and was transferred Tuesday ahead of a supposed prisoner exchange for American teacher Marc Fogel. File Photo Provided By Simela Pantzartzi/EPA-EFE
Feb. 12 (UPI) — Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday said that the United States will release alleged cybercrime boss Alexander Vinnik in exchange for the recently-freed teacher Marc Fogel.
“This citizen of the Russian Federation will also be returned to Russia in the coming days,” Peskov said Wednesday.
Vinnik has been housed at Alameda County Jail in California and was transferred Tuesday ahead of his sentencing, according to ABC News.
Vinnik, a Russian citizen arrested in Greece in 2017 was charged with allegedly leading an operation that laundered billions of dollars in bitcoin.
Peskov says that intensive talks between U.S. and Russian officials led to “both the release of Fogel as well as one of the citizens of the Russian Federation currently held in detention facilities in the United States.”
The White House did not disclose further details on the exchange or if conversations between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin took place.
“I can only say this, we got a man home whose mother and family wanted him desperately,” Trump said of Fogel.
On Tuesday, Waltz said that the administration “negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine,” he wrote in a statement.
However, Trump indicated that Russian officials “were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually.”
Fogel, 63, was returned to the United States on Tuesday and was greeted by President Donald Trump at the White Huouse around 10 p.m. EDT after three years in a Russian jail.
In June 2022, Fogel was convicted for what authorities claimed was engaging in “large-scale drug smuggling” when he as found with cannabis his lawyer said was used for back pain. Fogel got sentenced to 14 years in a high-security Russian prison.
His arrival came hours after National Security Adviser Mike Waltz announced in a press release shared with UPI that Fogel left Russian airspace on board a private jet with Steve Witkoff, who now is Trump’s Middle East envoy with an expanded portfolio to include Russia and its war in Ukraine.
Last year in October, then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed that Fogel had been “wrongfully detained.”
On Wednesday, the Kremlin declined to confirm if other prisoner exchanges were in the works.
But according to Peskov, “contacts between the relevant departments have intensified in the last few days.”
“Trump (has) got the right to do something good for Russia,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Russia political analyst based in Moscow, told The New York Times on Fogel’s release.
It came on the heels of other prisoner swaps in recent months with Russia negotiated by the prior Biden administration, including the likes of U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian journalist with British citizenship who also holds an American green card.