When the war in Ukraine broke out in February, Trevor Reed said he believed it meant he would probably never return home.
The former US Marine was imprisoned in Russia for nearly three years at the time, held hostage after being convicted on trumped-up charges. For 985 days, Reed was held in a series of Russian prisons, thrown into solitary confinement cells as small as a closet, for 23 hours a day, placed in a psychiatric ward and sent to a forced labor camp, which he described as feels like something “from the Middle Ages.”
But within two months, Reed was at home in the United States, released on April 27 as part of an exchange of prisoners arranged between the Biden administration and the Kremlin. Reed was released in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine in the United States.
Now back in America and with his family for the first time, Reed is trying to adjust to normal life.
“I hung out with my family a lot, trying to get used to being free again,” the former Marine told ABC News in one of his first interviews since his release. “It takes a while, this process. But I feel better every day.”
Marine veteran Trevor Reed was interviewed by ABC News reporter Patrick Rivel on May 21, 2022.
For more than ABC News’s interview with Trevor Reed, watch the GMA on Monday, May 23, at 7 a.m. ET. And for the full interview, join ABC News Live at 8:30 p.m.
He said that when he was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 2019, he was a healthy 175-kilogram student majoring in international security research. When he was released, he said he had lost 131 pounds, was ill, coughed up blood and feared he had contracted tuberculosis.
“He looked awful. He looked really weak and had dark circles under his eyes and he just didn’t look like Trevor who left for Russia,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, told ABC News. “So it was hard to see him look that way.”
The long trial began with the arrest in 2019
The trials of the 30-year-old Texas resident began in 2019, when he was visiting his Russian girlfriend, who recently graduated in law, in Moscow. Reed, who was studying Russian, was nearing the end of his stay in the countryside and attending a party with friends of his girlfriend, where he was drinking vodka.
ABC News reporter Patrick Reevel interviews Marine Veteran Trevor Reed on May 21, 2022.
On the way home, Reed became uncontrollable, according to his girlfriend, Alina Tsibulnik, and jumped out of the car. Unable to return him and fearing for his safety, Cibulnik and her friends said they had called the police to ask them to take Reed to a drunken tank to sober him up.
Two officers agreed, and after taking Reed to the station, they told his girlfriend to come and pick him up in the morning. Reed, who says the last thing he remembers was being in the park, said that when he woke up in the lobby of the police station the next morning, he was initially free to leave.
But while he waited for his girlfriend to arrive to pick him up, the shift changed and the police officers on the next shift decided to detain him. Then, he said, agents from Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence service, the Federal Security Service or the FSB arrived and questioned him.
“I almost found out as soon as I saw the FSB agents where this case was going,” Reed said.
“The main thing they wanted to know was about my military service,” Reed added. “I was not asked at all, not a single question whether I had committed a crime, whether I had committed something wrong. I was not asked anything about it at all. They wanted to know, above all, about my military service. “
Upon the arrival of the agents, the police suddenly accused Reed of assaulting the police officers who had taken him the night before, accusing him of endangering their lives.
He was detained on the spot.
Kangaroo Court
Reed was brought to justice in what he described as a “kangaroo court” and which the US embassy denounced as absurd. At a hearing attended by ABC News, the two police officers who were allegedly attacked by Reed struggled to remember the incident and repeatedly contradicted each other, at one point becoming so confused that the judge laughed at them.
Reed told ABC News that during an interrogation with the two officers, they admitted to him that they had been ordered to make false accusations against him.
“I asked, you know, one of these officers, and I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Why did you write this as a fake, you know, accusation against me? ”And he looked at the door to make sure no one was there, and he looked at the other officer, and he said,“ We didn’t want to write this. We were told to write this, “Reed said.
Although he believed the trial was pre-determined, Reed struggled to prove his innocence by repeatedly appealing his decisions. He accused the Russian authorities of trying to pressure him to withdraw his resistance, including at one point sending him to a psychiatric hospital to “scare” me.
“It was pretty awful. You know, blood on the walls. There’s a hole in the toilet floor,” Reed said, adding that human feces were all over the floor of a cramped cell he shared with four other inmates who had suffered serious injuries. psychological states.
“I thought maybe they sent me there to chemically deactivate me, give me sedatives or whatever, and make me incapable of fighting,” Reed said.
ABC News reporter Patrick Reevel stands with Marine veteran Trevor Reed and Reed’s parents, Paula and Joey Reed, May 21, 2022.
After more than a year in pre-trial detention, which he described as “extremely dirty” and full of rats, Reid was sentenced in mid-2020 to nine years in prison. He was transported to a prison in Mordovia, about 300 miles from Moscow, a former Gulag camp built just after World War II.
But there, Reed said he refused to work or worship prison rules.
Marine veteran Trevor Reed is reuniting with his family for his first meeting since his release from a Russian prison in San Antonio, Texas, on April 28, 2022.
“Ethically, I thought it would be wrong to work for a government that kidnaps Americans and uses them as political hostages,” Reed said. “I couldn’t justify that to myself.”
As punishment, he said he was placed in isolation for 15 days at a time, sleeping in a cold cell on the floor at night, trying to stay warm by snuggling up to a hot water pipe.
“I mean, it was hard, but I wouldn’t let that change my actions,” Reed said.
He won the respect of the prisoners
Reed said that even when camp guards “hated” him for disobeying their work orders, his resistance aroused the admiration of other prisoners.
“I have consistently fought and resisted the government there,” he said. “The prisoners in the Russian prison, the criminal element there, they respected that.
He said he survived by continuing his battle for justice, while refusing to allow himself to hope to ever return home.
Watch the special edition of ABC News live “985 Days: The Trevor Reed Interview” on Monday, May 23, at 8:30 p.m. ET / 9:30 p.m. PT
Meanwhile, Reed’s parents continued to fight for his freedom. His father, Joey Reed, flew to Russia, spending more than a year attending his son’s court hearings and lobbying US diplomats in Moscow. In the United States, he, his wife and daughter organized an intense campaign of government leaders on both sides of the political path to work on his cause.
Marine veteran Trevor Reed will visit the Moscow Zoo in 2019.
Joey and Paula Reed went on to fight all the way to the White House, eventually meeting with President Biden, who they say is crucial in convincing his administration to finally make a deal.
“My parents and my friend Alina did everything,” said Trevor Reed. “They gave up their whole lives to help me.”
Trafficking in prisoners
Reed said that on the day he was changed, he was loaded on the plane by 20 FSB agents, but did not say anything about the destination. But when the plane headed south and he saw it flying over water, Reed said he realized it had to be the Black Sea and head for Turkey. However, Russia’s aging government plane was so dilapidated, Reed said, fearing they could crash before reaching any exchange.
On the asphalt in Turkey, he passed Yaroshenko, he said.
“I remember looking at him and he looked at me. I think we both probably had the same feeling, the same thought as “this man looks like,” Reed said.
Treated by doctors on the return of the plane, Reed said he was struggling to shake off new concerns about flying.
“Most of all, I hoped the plane didn’t crash before I saw my family,” he said.
Salaries are fighting for other hostages
Reed said that when he first landed in the United States, his parents were there to meet him, but he said he could not hug or touch them until he underwent a full medical examination to make sure there was no tuberculosis. or other infectious diseases. .
Since receiving medical permission, he said he had tried to adjust to a normal life, even remembering a little English after speaking Russian for the past three years.
But Reed said he could not stop thinking about the other former Marine hostage in Russia, Paul Whelan, who had been abandoned. Whelan, who was captured in 2018 while attending a wedding in Moscow, has been arrested on espionage charges that the US government claims were also fabricated to be taken as a bargaining chip. Whelan is in a prison camp also in Mordovia, sentenced to 16 years.
Russia had previously offered to trade Whelan for Yaroshenko and other Russians held in the United States, and at one time it was thought that Reed and Whelan could trade as a couple.
“I had a really strong sense of guilt that I was free and that Paul Whelan was still in prison. I thought when I realized that this is an exchange that is …
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