MOSCOW, August 29. /TASS/. Maria Butina, a member of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament), said on Tuesday that her book, Prison Diary, which came out in 2020 in Russian, has been translated into English amid high interest abroad.

Butina was arrested by US intelligence agencies in 2018 and charged with being a foreign agent. She documented her thoughts and feelings throughout her 467-day stay in custody in the United States and later summarized them in a book.

"I decided that the book should be in English because many people abroad wanted to read it, but it was only in Russian <…>. There were questions from people from various countries, not only from America and Great Britain, who asked whether they could read it [in English]. Some tried to do this with the help of a machine translator, but, naturally, this doesn’t reflect the literary riches of the text," she told a news conference at TASS.

According to Butina, Russia’s agency for international humanitarian cooperation has sent her books to Russian centers of culture in 20 countries and the Russian foreign ministry has requested more than 1,000 copies so it can send them to foreign embassies. She also said that her book will be sent to all TASS offices. Apart from that, it is planned to translate the book into Serbian and Arabic.

Butina’s case

Maria Butina was arrested in Washington on July 15, 2018. She was charged with conspiracy to act as a foreign agent in the United States. American intelligence services argued that the Russian citizen had carried out this activity without being registered as an agent of a foreign state with the US Department of Justice.

On December 13, 2018, Butina pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate US law governing foreign agents operating in the country and signed a plea bargain. On April 26, 2019, she was sentenced to 18 months behind bars. In her final statement, she said that the goal of her visit to the US was to help improve relations between Washington and Moscow and that she did not know that she had to be registered as a foreign agent. She apologized for her actions that were interpreted as violation of US law. The presiding judge admitted that Butina was not acting as a spy and sustained the prosecution’s motion to deport Butina when her sentence was over. On May 8, 2019, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons said that Butina would be released on November 5. However, her prison term was shortened and ended on October 25, 2019. She was released from prison and deported to Russia.

The Russian initially arrived in the United States to attend college and obtained a master’s degree in international relations from American University in Washington D.C.

In September 2021, she became a member of the Russian State Duma on the ruling United Russia party’s ticket after Kirov Region governor Igor Vasilyev ceded his seat.