On Thursday, Russia released a double citizen who helped to help a charity organization in an exchange with the United States for a German-Russian citizen who accused of using sensitive US electronics for the use of the Russia’s military.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Ksenia Karelina, who was guilty last year, betrayed money to donate money for a charity based in the USA that supported Ukraine on her way home.
Her lawyer confirmed Reuters that Karelina had been released as part of an exchange against Arthur Petrov, a German-Russian citizen who was arrested in Cyprus in 2023 at the request of the United States in order to have supposedly exported sensitive microelectronics.
The Wall Street Journal reported the news for the first time.
CIA director John Ratcliffe and a high -ranking Russian intelligence officer, according to a CIA official cited by the journal, had talks for the exchange in Abu Dhabi.
“Today President (Donald) Trump took home another wrongly captured American,” Ratcliffe told the magazine in a statement. I am proud of the CIA officials who have worked tirelessly to support these efforts and we appreciate the government of the VAE for enabling the exchange. “
Imprisoned German-Russian part of the exchange
Karelina went to the United States on Thursday morning in a Abu Dhabi plane, said her Russian lawyer Mikhail Mushailov.
Karelina, who was born in 1991, arrived in the USA in 2012 for a work study program and settled in Maryland, where she was briefly married.
Karelina worked as a beautician in a spa in Los Angeles when she traveled to a family in Russia. It was arrested in January 2024.
It was then brought to trial behind closed doors in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Uralbergen in Russia. Karelina owed herself guilty that the betrayal in the hope of receiving an easier prison sentence, said her lawyer said at that time.
She was found guilty last August in August and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Last year, the US Ministry of Justice said that Petrov had taken part in a program for the procurement of microelectronics in the United States to deliver weapons and other devices to the Russian military.
The Ministry of Justice said Petrov had formed an elaborate technically smuggling syndicate, which is spirited by a network of Shell companies for the military-industrial complex of Russia. Petrov was not available for a comment.
It is the third remarkable prisoner exchange between the countries in less than a year. The US teacher Marc Fogel was released from a Russian prison in February during a visit to Trump’s Middle East, Steve Witkoff.
Russia and the United States in the past few months of the Joe Biden government have completed a large -scale exchange of prisoners, the largest since the Cold War. On the exchange, the American citizen Paul Whelan, reporter of Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich and the Russian journalists and dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza was released from Russian prisons.
The former US marine Paul Whelan, born in Canada, spent more than five years as a prisoner in Russia for the charges for pseudo-espionage.
The US delegations met on Thursday on Thursday. According to Moscow and Washington, the focus is on restoring the work of diplomatic missions after years of conflict, mutual intimidation claims and even freezing diplomatic property of complicated relationships between the two nuclear powers, which were tightened by the invasion of Ukraine in Russia in February 2022.
“Ukraine is not, absolutely not on the agenda,” said Tammy Bruce, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, on Tuesday.
“These conversations focus exclusively on our embassy operations, not on the normalization of a bilateral relationship as a whole, which, as we have determined, can only happen as soon as there is peace between Russia and Ukraine.”
