(Reuters) -Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national convicted of cybercrime and released by U.S. authorities as part of a prisoner swap, arrived in Moscow on Thursday and thanked President Vladimir Putin and others for arranging the exchange, state news agency RIA said.
Vinnik, who pleaded guilty in May 2024 to charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, told RIA in a dispatch issued after midnight that he was already at home with his family.
He said he had flown on a U.S. plane that stopped in Poland and not in Turkey as his lawyer had said.
Quoted by RIA, Vinnik thanked Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Russian diplomats and special services, his lawyers “and especially my family”.
He added: “What can I say? And I can also thank Trump. On the whole, without him, things would probably have been difficult.”
Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s State Duma lower house of parliament, told TASS news agency that Vinnik’s return home was “yet another victory for Russian diplomacy and all services and agencies associated with his liberation”.
Unlike previous instances of Russians returning home after a prisoner swap, there was little fanfare around Vinnik’s arrival.
“They brought me home in quite a normal fashion on a special flight through Poland,” he told RIA. “We refuelled on the (U.S.) east coast, then in Poland. Refuelled and then here. I’m home. I can’t yet quite believe it.”
TASS news agency reported that a U.S. Air Force passenger aircraft had left Moscow’s Vnukovo airport heading in a westerly direction after spending about an hour on the ground.
It was not clear whether it was the same aircraft that had brought Vinnik to Moscow.
Vinnik operated a cryptocurrency exchange, BTC-e, through which he was suspected of funnelling $4 billion in proceeds from ransomware attacks, identity theft, drug rings and other criminal activity.
He was freed by the United States from prison in return for Moscow’s release of American schoolteacher Marc Fogel, who returned home on Tuesday.
Another detained – and unidentified – American was released from ex-Soviet Belarus, one of Moscow’s biggest allies, which was used to launch part of the Kremlin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Chris Reese, Franklin Paul and Nia Williams)
