New Delhi: Russian Ambassador to the US on Thursday revealed that more than a hundred Russian nationals are currently in American jails.
His comments came after he visited two Russians, Anatoly Legkodymov and Dmitry Ukrainsky, jailed in New York on Wednesday.
“We will definitely continue the practice of visiting our compatriots who ended up in American dungeons,” Russia Today quoted Antonov as saying to reporters.
“According to some reports, we actually have more than 100 people,” he added.
Antonov said that most of the charges Russian citizens face in the US are politically motivated.
“I have heard more than once that if you are Russian, this means that you should receive a longer sentence than if you were, for example, Italian, French or British,” Antonov added.
On 14 April, Antonov had told TASS that he plans to visit three Russian citizens incarcerated in US prisons in the near future.
“We continue fighting against the US practice of hunting for Russians,” he had said.
“Today, more than one hundred people [Russian nationals] are being kept in American prisons. Fifty-nine of our citizens have been extradited from third countries in recent years,” he added.
“By the way, after [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov’s departure from New York on April 26, I plan to personally visit two Russians who are in prison in Brooklyn. They are Dmitry Ukrainsky and Anatoly Legkodymov. In May, I intend to visit Vladislav Klyushin,” Antonov had said.
The charges
Legkodymov was accused of breaking US banking regulations while running the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato in January. Although he was a citizen of China, the US believed that his brief stay in Miami, Florida was sufficient for it to exercise jurisdiction over him.
Legkodymov “knowingly allowed Bitzlato to become a perceived safe haven for funds used for and resulting from a variety of criminal activities,” according to federal authorities, and “failed to meet US regulatory safeguards, including anti-money laundering requirements.”
If convicted, he faces up to five years behind bars.
Ukrainsky was accused of money laundering in Thailand. He pleaded not guilty but was sentenced to ten years in 2019. He is expected to be released on parole, but Thai authorities extradited him to the US in June 2022 instead. Though Ukrainsky insists he had never even been to the US, American authorities claim he stole over $300,000 from the accounts of US citizens.
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there were “more than 60” Russian citizens currently in US prisons, many on “dubious” charges, and several who had been “abducted” by US authorities from third countries.
He brought up the case of Maria Butina, a Russian gun rights activist who was imprisoned in the US on trumped-up charges.
Butina was arrested at the height of ‘Russiagate’ hysteria and charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. She spent over 18 months in jail and then in federal prison, before she was deported to Russia in October 2019.
With inputs from agencies
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from US holding 'more than 100' Russian citizens in jail, most of the charges politically motivated, says Ambassador Antonov
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