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Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced earlier today that a Russian national imprisoned in the U.S. will be exchanged “in the coming days” following yesterday’s release of American schoolteacher Marc Fogel. Peskov added, however, that the individual's identity would only be disclosed after the swap is completed. The Kremlin spokesperson declined to comment when asked about the possible release of convicted cryptocurrency fraudster Alexander Vinnik.
Russia released Marc Fogel from a penal colony on Feb. 11, and he left the country aboard a plane belonging to Donald Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. The White House called Fogel’s release a “show of good faith” and a “sign that we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine.”
However, Peskov stressed that Russia has no plans to discuss territorial exchanges with Ukraine. He claimed that all Ukrainian forces will be “expelled or destroyed” from Russia’s Kursk Region — where the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been holding a strip of territory since August of 2024.
Marc Fogel is a former schoolteacher and a staff member at the Anglo-American School in Moscow. In 2021, he was arrested at the border with 17 grams of medical marijuana in his luggage, which he had been using for chronic pain treatment as prescribed by a doctor. In 2022, a Russian court sentenced Fogel to 14 years in prison on drug smuggling charges.
IT specialist Alexander Vinnik, who is reported to be the Russian prisoner involved in the exchange for Fogel, was arrested in 2017 in a small beachside village in northern Greece at the request of the United States. U.S. authorities accused Vinnik of laundering more than $4 billion in Bitcoin through BTC-e — a crypto exchange he allegedly operated.
The indictment claimed that Vinnik “received funds from the infamous computer intrusion or ‘hack’ of Mt. Gox – an earlier digital currency exchange that eventually failed, in part due to losses attributable to hacking. Vinnik obtained funds from the hack of Mt. Gox and laundered those funds through various online exchanges, including his own BTC-e and a now defunct digital currency exchange, Tradehill, based in San Francisco, California.”
In 2020, after a two-year legal tug-of-war, Vinnik was extradited from Greece to France, where he was sentenced to five years in prison for money laundering while being cleared of the charge that he had defrauded close to 200 people using ransomware.
French prosecutors said Vinnik helped develop “Locky,” a malicious software spread through email. Once downloaded, it encrypted the recipient’s data and demanded a ransom in bitcoin for its release.
Between 2016 and 2018, a wave of such attacks targeted French businesses and organizations, leading 20 victims to pay ransom demands in bitcoin via BTC-e, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges at the time.
Vinnik was released on Aug. 4, 2022, but was immediately sent back to Greece, which had requested his return in order to enforce the original U.S. warrant accusing him of running a digital currency platform used by cybercriminals worldwide for money laundering. Meanwhile, Russia had also sought Vinnik on lesser, unrelated charges.
Vinnik made his first appearance in a U.S. court in San Francisco on Aug. 5, 2022. After initially maintaining his innocence, in May 2024 Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. Vinnik’s lawyer, Arkady Bukh, said that due to the plea bargain, he expected Vinnik to get a prison term of less than 10 years.
Speculation about Vinnik’s potential return to Russia first surfaced in summer 2024 amid negotiations with Europe over a prisoner swap. These discussions sought to exchange Russian political prisoners held in Russian penal colonies for Moscow’s spies and convicted criminals in the EU.
The rumors gained traction after Vinnik’s name disappeared from U.S. prison databases. Around the same time, records also vanished for Maxim Marchenko and Vadim Konoshchenok.
The name of Nikolaos (“Nikos”) Bogonikolos, a Greek scientist and businessman, also disappeared from public records at around the same time, as previously reported by The Insider. A United States federal court in Brooklyn has charged Bogonikolos of assisting Russian organizations in evading sanctions, including by purchasing lasers, transistors, and NATO tactical antennas while claiming they were intended for private pleasure yachts in the Netherlands.
Marchenko is serving a three-year prison sentence on charges of smuggling dual-use microelectronics into Russia to circumvent sanctions.
Vadim Konoshchenok is a Russian national accused of being an FSB-linked smuggler involved in illegally exporting U.S. military technology and dual-use electronics to Russia in violation of sanctions.
Konoshchenok was one of the members of the Serniya smuggling network, previously reported on by The Insider.
He was arrested in Estonia in 2022 and later extradited to the U.S.