American school teacher and former diplomat Marc Fogel has been released from prison in Russia and is on the way home to the US, according to US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
Waltz said Mr Fogel’s release had been negotiated as part of an exchange with Russia, without providing further details.
He said Mr Fogel, 63, was on a plane with Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and would be reunited with his family Tuesday.
“We are beyond grateful, relieved, and overwhelmed that after more than three years of detention, our father, husband, and son, Marc Fogel, is finally coming home,” Mr Fogel’s family said in a statement to CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.
“This has been the darkest and most painful period of our lives, but today, we begin to heal,” his wife, Jane, and sons, Ethan and Sam, said in the statement.
Mr Fogel was arrested at an airport for the illegal possession of cannabis in 2021.
He was charged with carrying a small amount of medical marijuana, which had been prescribed in the US, and given a 14-year prison sentence.
Mr Fogel’s legal team thanked President Donald Trump for his role in the negotiation and criticised what they called the “bureaucratic inaction” of the previous Biden administration.
“President Trump secured Marc’s release in just a few weeks, wasting no time in taking decisive action to bring Marc home,” a statement from his lawyers said.
In an interview with CBS in July last year, Mr Fogel’s mother, Malphine Fogel, was also critical of former President Joe Biden’s handling of her son’s case.
“I don’t think the administration has helped us one bit,” she said at the time. The Biden White House did not respond to CBS’s request for comment.
Among the family’s complaints, Mr Fogel wasn’t classed by the US government as wrongfully detained until December 2024, despite beginning his sentence in 2022.
US basketball star Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia on a similar charge of cannabis possession in 2022, but was freed in an exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout ten months later.
Mr Fogel, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was a teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow. He had previously worked as a diplomat at the US embassy there.
While in prison, he reportedly taught English to fellow inmates.
Waltz said Mr Fogel’s release 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”.
It is unclear if the US released someone in return for Mr Fogel.
Russia did not immediately comment on Mr Fogel’s release.
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