As part of the largest post-Cold War prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia executed on Thursday, American officials agreed to release Russian nationals held within its prisons for crimes ranging from hacking to money laundering.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan are being welcomed back to the U.S. in a swap that involved the release of 16 people previously detained in Russia in exchange for eight held in the U.S., Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland.
Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who was arrested in Russia in 2020, was also released from Russia along with Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident.
“Their brutal ordeal is over. And they’re free,” President Joe Biden said on Thursday in an address from the White House.
Here’s what we know about some of the freed Russian prisoners:
Vadim Konoshchenok
Vadim Konoshchenok was accused of illegally providing U.S. electronics and ammunition to the Russian military. He was extradited from Estonia and charged last year with conspiracy in a money laundering scheme on behalf of the Kremlin.
“This defendant, who is suspected of having ties to the (Russia’s Federal Security Service), smuggled hundreds of thousands of illicit munitions in support of Moscow’s war machine, using front companies to conceal his criminal enterprise,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a Department of Justice news release last year.
Konoshchenok allegedly identified himself as an FSB “colonel” in communications, with a photo of himself in an FSB uniform. He used a front company in Estonia to help smuggle more than half a ton of military-grade ammunition into Russia, an indictment said. He was facing up to 30 years in prison.
Vladislav Klyushin
Russian businessman Vladislav Klyushin was sentenced last year to nine years in prison for a “hack-to-trade scheme” that raked in about $93 million for the trading of corporate information stolen from U.S. computer networks, the DOJ said.
He was also ordered to pay over $34 million in fees and additional restitution.
He was extradited from Switzerland in 2021.
“Mr. Klyushin hacked into American computer networks to obtain confidential corporate information that he used to make money illegally in the American stock market,” Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy said in September after sentencing. “He thought he could get away with his crimes by perpetrating them from a foreign base, hidden behind layers of fake domain names, virtual private networks and computer servers rented under pseudonyms and paid for with cryptocurrency. He found out otherwise and will now spend nearly a decade of his life in a U.S. prison.”
Klyushin and four co-conspirators worked at his Moscow-based IT company M-13. From January 2018 to September 2020, he used hacked and stolen information earnings reports and other information that hadn’t been made public to trade in the stock market.
Roman Seleznev
Roman Seleznev, son of a Russian lawmaker, was handed a 27-year sentence in 2017 for a massive hacking scheme that targeted point-of-sales systems to steal credit card information, which resulted in $169 million in losses.
The sentence from a Washington state federal court was the longest ever imposed for hacking crimes in the U.S.
Seleznev was also serving two concurrent sentences of 14 years each for racketeering in Georgia and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in Nevada.
From 2009 to 2013, Seleznev targeted businesses that included several small businesses in Washington. Broadway Grill in Seattle went bankrupt after Seleznev’s cyber attack, the DOJ said. Seleznev would hack into the point-of-sale systems, steal the credit card numbers and then sell them in illegal networks. The credit card numbers were then used in fraudulent purchases.
Released from Germany: Vadim Krasikov
Considered the biggest concession from another nation toward releasing those detained in Russia, Vadim Krasikov was convicted of a 2019 murder of a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park. He was serving a life sentence in Germany.
Russian President Vladimir Putin previously hinted he might want Krasikov traded for Gershkovich’s release in an interview with Tucker Carlson in February.
Germany’s government confirmed Krasikov’s release and said it was “not an easy decision,” but it was motivated by protecting German nationals and solidarity with the U.S.
Contributing: Joey Garrison, Kim Hjelmgaard and Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY; Reuters
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