Marc Fogel, a US teacher and former diplomat arrested in Russia, is back on US soil—and a Russian cybercrime kingpin is apparently set to depart from it. "We got a man home whose mother and family wanted him desperately," President Trump said Wednesday of Fogel, per ABC News, adding, "We were treated very nicely by Russia." Though Trump at one point said Fogel's release was a "show of good faith" from the Russians, a US official tells ABC that the US is preparing to release Alexander Vinnik into Russian custody as part of a swap. A lawyer for Vinnik confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that his family had been told he is being prepped for transport back to Russia from California.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that a Russian citizen had been freed in exchange for Fogel and would return home "in the coming days." Vinnik, arrested in Greece in 2017 before his extradition to the US, was accused of moving billions of dollars for criminals around the world and laundering Bitcoin stolen in the hack of Mt. Gox. He pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e and was due to be sentenced in June. An official tells ABC he will forfeit $100 million of his criminal proceeds as part of the deal.
"I feel like the luckiest man on Earth right now," Fogel told reporters at the White House on Wednesday, per the BBC. "I'm a middle-class school teacher who's now in a dream world." He was arrested in Russia in 2021 for illegal possession of cannabis and handed a 14-year prison sentence. The US State Department classified him as wrongfully detained in December, per the BBC. "To me he looks damned good," Trump said of the 63-year-old, telling reporters that another American prisoner "that you will know of" would be freed shortly. He did not say from where. (More prisoner swap stories.)
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