DANBURY /Connecticut/, August 24. /TASS/. Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko who is serving a 20-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, believes that Moscow will be able to ensure his return to his homeland, his wife Viktoria told reporters after her first meeting with her husband since 2011.
"He does believe, he hopes so very much and never gives up," she said when asked by a TASS correspondent whether Yaroshenko hopes to return to Russia to serve his sentence on Russian soil. "I tried to tell him that may not work out," Viktoria Yaroshenko added. "He answered, ‘I don’t even want to talk about that."
The Russian pilot’s wife expressed the hope that the year would end well. "I hope that there will be some transfer, either under the convention (the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons - TASS) or an exchange or some agreements, I don’t know," she added.
Konstantin Yaroshenko’s first meeting with his wife and daughter Yekaterina took place in the FCI Danbury on Friday and lasted about eight hours.
Plea for extradition
Viktoria Yaroshenko said on she might send another letter to US President Donald Trump to request her husband’s release.
In July 2017, a request on extradition to Russia, written on Yaroshenko’s behalf, was sent to Trump.
According to Viktoria Yaroshenko, the request was left unanswered.
"There was absolutely no reaction, no response," she said. "Maybe we should write another one as long as we are here, and take it straight to the White House?"
Swap
Yaroshenko's attorney Alexei Tarasov told TASS the US government is unlikely to agree to swap the jailed Russian pilot for anyone who is not a US citizen,
"I have no idea of how ready the US authorities will be to swap Konstantin for a person, who is not a citizen of the United States," Tarasov said.
Speaking about the possibility to swap Yaroshenko, Tarasov recalled media rumors about swapping him for Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, which emerged before her release from a Russian prison in 2016.
"To put it plainly, an exchange of this kind can hardly be acceptable for the United States. After all, if he is swapped, he will be swapped to an American, I believe," the lawyer said.
However, he did not rule out the possibility of swapping Yaroshenko for a person with dual citizenship. He added that consultations on the issue have taken place, but refused to give any further details.
Yaroshenko case
Yaroshenko was arrested in Liberia in May 2010, and was later clandestinely transferred to the United States. In September 2011, he was found guilty of conspiring to smuggle a major cocaine shipment into the US, and sentenced to 20 years behind bars. However, Yaroshenko pleaded not guilty, saying that his arrest was a setup and the case was fabricated.
Until recently, Yaroshenko had been serving out his sentence at the Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution, but in mid-June he was first transferred to a transit prison in Brooklyn, New York, and then to the current Danbury prison, which holds more than 1,400 inmates.
Russian officials and the pilot’s family have repeatedly requested that Washington transfer him to Russia.