MOSCOW, April 28. /TASS/. Russian air pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who on Wednesday was exchanged for US citizen Trevor Reed, has told the daily Izvestia in an interview that he had never met Viktor Bout, but believes that both cases - Bout’s and his own - were fabricated by the United States.

"No, I only saw him on TV," Yaroshenko said, when asked if he had ever met Bout. "His case was fabricated. It is totally absurd. The very idea of justice in the United States does not exist. There are lies everywhere."

The Russian Foreign Ministry on April 27 said Konstantin Yaroshenko had been exchanged for US citizen Trevor Reed. In 2011, Yaroshenko was sentenced in the United States to 20 years in prison on drug smuggling charges. He pleaded not guilty and slammed his arrest as a provocation and the whole case as a frame-up.

US student Trevor Reed was tried in Russia and sentenced to nine years in 2020 for attacking police officers.

Viktor Bout case

Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008 as a result of a provocation staged by US secret services. During the same year the United States launched criminal proceedings against Bout for an alleged intention to sell weapons to an organization regarded terrorist in the United States. Although in Thailand, Bout won two court proceedings against his extradition, the verdicts pronounced by lower instance courts were eventually appealed and overturned. In 2019, Bout was taken to the United States. Moscow slammed this as an example of outrageous injustice.

In 2011, jurors in New York found Bout guilty of a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and of providing aid to a terrorist organization. Bout pleaded not guilty on all counts. Federal judge Shira Scheindlin sentenced Bout to the minimum 25-year prison term.

Scheindlin, who resigned in 2016, has repeatedly said that the sentence she had had to pronounce was excessive and inappropriate.