The press office of the Moscow courts on Tuesday he reported that Robert Woodland Romanov, a US citizen who has been living in Russia for several years, was arrested on Friday and will serve two months in preventive detention. He is accused of illegal drug trafficking: according to Russian law he risks 8 to 20 years in prison. The press office statement provided no further details on the allegations. The US embassy has not yet commented on the arrest.
Romanov is 33 years old and was born in Russia, in the Perm region, but was adopted from an early age by an American couple. A few years ago he returned to Russia to look for his biological mother and their meeting was broadcast on a reality show on state television. Since then he had been living in Russia, where before his arrest he worked as an English teacher.
Several US citizens are already detained in Russia: Paul Whelan, a former Marine arrested in 2018, and Evan Gershkovich, a journalist from Wall Street Journal, both accused of espionage. Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in prison, while Gershkovich’s trial is still ongoing. Another journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, was arrested last October for failing to register as a “foreign agent”, a term which under Russian law indicates people or organizations that according to the government receive funds from abroad to carry out anti-government activities, and which in fact is used to repress freedom of the press and more. All charges against these individuals are disputed by the United States government.
The Russian government in the past has arrested US citizens and then exchanged them for Russian criminals convicted in the United States: it did so in the case of Brittney Griner, a basketball player arrested for drug trafficking in 2022 and then released in exchange for the release of Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer detained in US. In September the Wall Street Journal had writtenciting Western government sources, that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be ready to exchange one or more American hostages currently imprisoned in Russia for Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of the former commander of the Chechen separatists Zelimkhan Khangoshvili.
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