The US President Donald Trump has agreed to extradite prisoner Alexander Vinnik to Russia in exchange for the release of former US embassy employee Mark Vogel.
This was confirmed by a White House representative to The New York Post.
Russian Alexander Vinnik was arrested in 2017 in Greece and extradited to France and then to the United States on charges of fraud and money laundering.
For six years before his arrest, Vinnyk ran the BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange, through which transactions worth over $9 billion were conducted.
In December 2020, a French court found Vinnyk guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to five years in prison. In May 2024, the Russian pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering before a federal judge in San Francisco, USA.
Oleksandr Vinnik did not register BTC-e in the US as a money services company, but he had several clients in the States.
- Mark Vogel was sentenced to 14 years in a maximum-security prison in Russia in a drug smuggling case — in 2021, cannabis and hashish oil were allegedly found on him at a Moscow airport.
- The last major prisoner exchange between Russia and the West took place in August 2024. A total of 26 people were exchanged. The Russian authorities extradited Russian political prisoners and American citizens held in Russian prisons to Germany and the United States. In exchange, Russia received alleged FSB and GRU agents and Russian hackers from the West.
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