The prisoner Fogel returns to the US and meets Trump

The American teacher Marc Fogel, held in Russia since 2021 on charges of marijuana trafficking, returned to the United States and was immediately received by President Donald Trump. The White House makes it known with a post on social X (“Promises made, promises kept”) showing an image while Fogel descends from the plane that brought him back to his country.

Trump announced that another prisoner will be released shortly. Describing the agreement on prisoners with Russia as “very fair, very reasonable”, Tycoon added that “someone else will be released tomorrow” without providing details.

Fogel’s liberation can be read as a first, significant, passage of a path that can culminate with the solution of the Ukrainian question. Trump, the White House had made it known yesterday without going into the details of the release of the American teacher, “negotiated an exchange that demonstrates the Russian goodwill and reports that we are moving in the right direction to end the terrible and violent war in Ukraine “. It was Trump’s special correspondent for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who reported Fogel with him.

Although he had started to serve a sentence of 14 in June 2022, Fogel had been classified as “unjustly detained” by the Biden Administration only at the end of last year. Witkoff, a billionaire from New York and a close friend of Trump, secretly negotiated the agreement, even if his presence in Moscow became evident when he flew there with his private jet, alerting the online trackers of the skies. It was the first journey known to Moscow of a high US official since William J. Burns, then director of the CIA, flew to the Russian capital in November 2021 to try to avoid a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States and Russia exchange harsh statements on their respective citizens in custody of the other, sometimes exchanging prisoners in scenes that recall the Cold War.

As in the last August, when the largest exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West was made from the end of the Cold War, which led to Moscow’s release of the American reporter Evan Gershkovich, the Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and the former Marine Paul Whelan. Fogel, 63, was sentenced in June 2022 by a Moscow court to 14 years in prison for cannabis trafficking. He had been stopped in August 2021 by the Customs officers while he arrived from New York to the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow with his wife; 11 grams of marijuana and 8 grams of cannabis oil had been found in its luggage. Fogel, who worked as a teacher in an American school in Moscow, had declared that marijuana was for medical use and that he did not know that in Russia he was not legal.