Swap Deal: Russian Pilot Yaroshenko Returns Home

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Mon May 02, 2022 at 05:37:00 PM EST
Tags: Konstantin Yaroshenko (all tags)

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The DEA's Most Excellent Adventures in Africa took a huge hit this week. On April 25, 2022, President Joe Biden commuted the 20 year sentence of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko to time served so that he would be eligible for immediate release -- and transfer home to Russia, in a prisoner exchange in which an American being held in Russia would fly back to the U.S. The official commutation order for Yaroshenko is here.

The swap occurred in Turkey. Rossiya 1, Russia's main national news channel, showed video of a joyous Yaroshenko being embraced by his wife and his daughter, who was jumping up and down on the tarmac at the airport in Moscow.

I've been writing about Yaroshenko and the DEA manufactured case against him and others since 2010. Here's my account of his trial with a summary of the underlying FBI sting in which cocaine would be flown from South America to Africa and then to Europe. [More...]

To get jurisdiction in the U.S. they had an informant announce in a meeting to nobody in particular that he was going to send a portion of his share to the U.S. Of course, there were never any drugs going anywhere, it was all make-believe. But Yaroshenko got a 20 year sentence.

Here is an excellent long version of the FBI sting from the Guardian written by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in 2015, which notes my criticism of the operation: [More...]

Some have questioned the policy, especially the lengths to which the DEA is going to in order to bring these cases under US jurisdiction. As Jeralyn Merritt, a criminal-defence lawyer in Colorado, puts it on her blog, TalkLeft: “Considering unless the DEA demands otherwise, the (illusory) drugs are going from South America to Africa to Europe, why is it even their business to intervene? Or to steer non-US criminal activity into the US?”