Konstantin Yaroshenko, Who Is He?

Russia and the U.S. have swapped prisoners, with the US securing the release of former Marine Trevor Reed and Russian securing the release of Konstantin Yaroshenko.

Trevor Reed was jailed in 2020 on assault charges stemming from a drunken night out in Moscow in 2019.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Trevor Reed was released after a “lengthy negotiation process” in exchange for Russian national Konstantin Yaroshenko, who has been jailed for more than a decade in the U.S. on drug smuggling charges.

Konstantin Yaroshenko is a pilot.

According to the Associated Press, the swap which took place on Wednesday (April 27, 2022) was carried out in a European nation, with flight tracking services showing a Russian prison plane landing in Turkey’s capital of Ankara earlier in the day.

The AP further said the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had updated its website overnight to reflect that Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who was convicted of smuggling cocaine into the U.S. in 2010 and sentenced to 20 years, was no longer behind bars.