On March 10, Russia and the USA exchanged prisoners in Abu Dhabi in the morning. This was stated by CIA director John Ratcliffe. informs The Washington Post.
The Russian side released Ksenia Karelin, who has US and Russian citizenship. In 2024, she was sentenced to 12 years in a high-security prison on charges of financing extremist and terrorist activities.
In response, the United States handed over to Moscow Artur Petrov, a citizen of Germany and Russia, who was detained in Cyprus in 2023 at the request of the United States on suspicion of illegally exporting microelectronics in violation of export restrictions.
The exchange took place with the participation of a high-ranking representative of Russian intelligence and the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, who was personally present at the Abu Dhabi airport during the transfer of the prisoners.
We will remind that in the summer of 2023, 33-year-old Artur Petrov was detained in Cyprus. According to the US Department of Justice, he and two accomplices between February 2022 and August 2023 purchased a large batch of electronics from US companies, despite the sanctions, for the Russian company Electrocom VPC. After the arrest, Petrov was extradited to the United States.
In August 2024, a Russian court found Ksenia Karelin guilty of “treason” and sentenced her to 12 years in prison. The accusation was based on the transfer of $51 in 2022 to the account of a Ukrainian charitable organization. Karelina has been living in the USA since 2015. In November 2024, the Yekaterinburg court left the sentence unchanged.
