Russia released Thursday a dual citizen who was sentenced to jail for donating money to a charity that was interacting with the United States for a German Russian citizen accused of exporting sensitive U.S. American electronics for use in the Russian military.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Ksenia Karelina was found guilty by a Russian court last year for donating money to Ukraine’s Ukraine’s humanitarian support and he is returning home.
Her lawyer confirmed to Reuters that Karelina was part of a swap deal for Arthur Petrov, a dual German Russian citizen arrested in Cyprus in 2023, who was asked by the United States for alleged export of sensitive microelectronic computers.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
A CIA official cited by the journal said CIA Director John Ratcliffe and a Russian intelligence official held talks in Abu Dhabi.
“Today, the President [Donald] Trump brought another American wrongfully to the return home.
Part of imprisoned Germany and Russia
Karelina traveled to the United States from a plane in Abu Dhabi on Thursday morning, her Russian lawyer Mikhail Mushailov said.
Karelina was working at a spa in Los Angeles when she was traveling to her family in Russia. She was detained in January 2024.
The U.S. Department of Justice said last year that Petrov participated in a program to purchase U.S. microelectronics for manufacturers of weapons and other equipment to the Russian military.
The Justice Ministry said Petrov had formed a well-designed technology smuggling group to pay tribute to Russia’s military industrial complex through Shell’s network. Petrov was unable to comment.
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, born in Canada, has been a prisoner in Russia for more than five years because he and U.S. officials call it a false surgery charge.
This is the third famous prisoner exchange between countries in less than a year. American teacher Marc Fogel was released from Russian prison in February when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow.
In the last months of the Joe Biden administration, Russia and the United States completed a massive exchange of prisoners, the largest since the Cold War. The exchange saw the release of US Canadian citizen Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Russian journalist and dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza from Russian prisons.
On Thursday, the delegations of the United States and Russia held separate talks. According to Moscow and Washington, the focus is restoring the common ties of years of conflict, threatening, and even freezing of diplomatic property, the relationship between the two nuclear forces has intensified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“Ukraine is not, it is definitely not the agenda,” State Department spokesman Tammy Bruce said on Tuesday.
“These negotiations focus only on the actions of our embassy, not on the bilateral relationship as a whole, which will only be as we have pointed out once there is peace between Russia and Ukraine.”
