NEW YORK, June 26. /TASS/. A federal court judge in Saipan, the capital of the US commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, has sentenced Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the time he served in a British prison, Reuters reports.

According to the news agency, Assange will be able to walk free from the courtroom on Wednesday after the judge approved a plea deal with prosecutors, ending his 14-year legal ordeal.

As part of the deal, Assange pleaded guilty to a felony charge for publishing US military secrets. The plea deal will allow him to return to Australia, his home country. Assange is expected to arrive in Canberra at about 6:40 p.m. local time (8:40 a.m. GMT), The Australian newspaper writes.

In 2019, Assange was placed in Britain's Belmarsh prison after being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For more than five years, Washington kept trying to ensure the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder from Britain to the United States, where he was accused of crimes related to the largest case of disclosure of classified information in American history.