Russia on Thursday freed a French political scholar in a prisoner swap with France, exchanging him for a Russian basketball player jailed in Europe, according to Russia’s security services.
Laurent Vinatier,
who had been serving a three-year prison sentence in Russia and was also facing espionage charges, was released after being pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement.
In return, Daniil Kasatkin, who had been detained in France and whose extradition was sought by the United States, was released and flown back to Russia.
The Frenchman was arrested in Moscow in June 2024. Russian authorities accused him of failing to register as a “foreign agent” while collecting information related to Russia’s military and military-technical activities, allegations they said posed a threat to national security. A Russian court later convicted him under the foreign agent law and sentenced him to three years in prison.
The FSB said Vinatier was also charged last year with espionage, a far more serious offence under Russian law that carries a potential sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison.
Putin had earlier said he was unaware of the case when asked about it by a French journalist during his annual news conference on December 19. Days later, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Moscow had made an offer to Paris regarding the scholar.
Vinatier is an adviser to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Switzerland-based organisation that said at the time of his arrest it was doing everything possible to assist him.
Human rights groups have criticised Russia’s foreign agent legislation under which the French scholar was convicted, as part of a broader crackdown on independent media, academics and political activists, particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine.
In recent years, Russia has detained several foreign nationals on criminal charges and later released them as part of prisoner exchanges with Western countries. The largest such swap since the Cold War took place in August 2024, when Moscow freed journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, former US Marine Paul Whelan, and Russian dissidents in a multinational deal that saw two dozen people released.
