Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages. In exchange for Reed, the US released jailed pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to import more than $100m worth of cocaine into the US.ĭespite these exchanges, none have quite involved the notoriety of a figure like Bout. Russian authorities had accused Reed of attacking a Moscow police officer and sentenced him to nine years in jail.
In April, former US marine Trevor Reed was released back to the US after being detained in Russia since 2019. Paul Whelan holds a sign as he stands inside a defendants’ cage during his verdict hearing in Moscow on 15 June 2020. In more recent memory, 10 Russian agents detained by the US were exchanged in 2010 for four Russian officials that the Kremlin had jailed over their illegal contacts with the west. The US released four eastern European spies in exchange for 25 people detained in East Germany and Poland.
A little over 20 years later, the US conducted what one American official called the “ biggest spy swap” in history. The Powers-Abel exchange paved the way for further prisoner swaps. The exchange, which took place on the fog-covered Glienicke Bridge on a cold, cloudy Berlin morning, was adapted into a Steven Spielberg thriller more than 50 years later. The first major exchange between the US and the Soviet Union occurred in February 1962 when Americans gave up Rudolf Abel, a convicted KGB spy, in exchange for American pilot Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union two years earlier. Prisoner swaps have been a long part of the history between the two former cold war adversaries. Although Blinken refused to say what the US was offering in return, a source familiar with the matter confirmed a CNN report that Washington was willing to swap Bout, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US, as part of the exchange. On Wednesday, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, announced that the US has made a “substantial proposal” to Russia to release Whelan and Griner. The US government has denounced Whelan’s charges as false and declared both Whelan and Griner were being “wrongfully detained”. Whelan, who also holds passports from Canada, the UK and Ireland, has repeatedly denied the charges and claims that he was set up. According to Russian officials, he was caught with a flash drive that contained classified information. In December 2018, former US marine and corporate security executive Paul Whelan was arrested in Russia on espionage charges and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Brittney Griner speaks to her lawyers standing in a cage at a courtroom prior to a hearing in Khimki, Russia on 26 July.
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