Marc Fogel, an American teacher detained in Russia since August 2021 for bringing medically prescribed marijuana into the country, was freed by Moscow on Tuesday and headed back to the United States, the White House announced.
The 63-year-old history teacher, who had been serving a 14-year sentence, was expected to be reunited with his family in the eastern state of Pennsylvania by the end of the day.
He left Russian airspace aboard the personal aircraft of Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign affairs envoy who helped negotiate his release.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, said the U.S. and Russia “negotiated an exchange” to free Fogel but gave no details about what the U.S. side of the bargain entailed. In such deals in recent years, the U.S. has often released Russian prisoners that Moscow wanted in exchange.
Instead, Waltz cast the deal for Fogel’s release in broader geopolitical terms, saying it was “a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine,” an invasion Russia launched against its neighbor in February 2022, with hundreds of thousands killed or wounded on both sides.
Trump had vowed to broker an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine before taking office Jan. 20, but his aides more recently have said he hopes to do it within the first 100 days of his new administration, roughly by the end of April.
“Since President Trump’s swearing-in, he has successfully secured the release of Americans detained around the world, and President Trump will continue until all Americans being held are returned to the United States,” Waltz said. The recent release of six Americans held in Venezuela and Fogel’s freeing are the only publicly known instances.
Fogel had been traveling with a small amount of medically prescribed marijuana to treat back pain. Once convicted by a Russian court, he began serving his 14-year sentence in June 2022, with the outgoing administration of former President Joe Biden late last year classifying him as wrongfully detained.
Witkoff is a billionaire New York real estate executive and close friend of Trump’s. He previously had helped negotiate the six-week Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza initiated by Biden in the last months of his presidency.
Witkoff also had been secretly negotiating the deal for Fogel’s release. Online flight trackers spotted his presence in Moscow when he flew there on his private jet.
With the U.S. leading the way in the West’s opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was the first known trip to Moscow by a senior U.S. official since William Burns, then the Central Intelligence Agency director, flew to the Russian capital in November 2021, in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Russia from invading Ukraine.
