‘Petty Hooliganism’ – US Awaits the Name of Next Prisoner to Be Released From Russian Captivity

After the US and Russia arranged a one-for-one swap of prisoners, with an additional American promised to be freed soon, all eyes are on Moscow to see which other detainee will be released.

On Wednesday, the US agreed to trade a Russian cybercrime boss in American captivity, Alexander Vinnik, in exchange for a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania, Marc Fogel, who was released on Tuesday after spending more than three years imprisoned in Moscow and a penal colony in Rybinsk.

Vinnik was arrested in 2017 and detained in the US on suspicion of laundering $4 billion through BTC-e, one of the world’s biggest crypto-currency exchanges at the time. Fogel had been held in Russia since 2021 on drug-related charges.

The latest quid-pro-quo follows a massive prisoner swap orchestrated by the administration of former US President Joe Biden. In August, Biden’s team negotiated the exchange of 24 prisoners with Russia, the largest such deal since the Cold War, when actual and suspected spies were regularly detained and charged by Moscow and Washington.

During his meeting with the recently returned American, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that another US prisoner “would be released tomorrow,” raising suspicions about who that detainee might be.

So which Americans remain in Russia’s custody today? There are at least nine of them:

• Joseph Tater was charged with “petty hooliganism” in August 2024 after allegedly assaulting staff at a Moscow hotel.

• Travis Leake, a musician who once worked on a 2014 Anthony Bourdain documentary in Russia, and was later arrested on drug charges in 2023. Speaking about the film, he noted, “This was a documentary series about musicians standing up and risking their lives in some cases, to stand up against government abuse of power, government corruption.”

• Robert Gillman, a former US Marine who was arrested on more than one charge of drunk-and-disorderly behavior and assault, and has been imprisoned since 2022.
• Evgeny “Eugene” Spector, was sentenced to 15 years in a high-security prison on espionage charges in December 2024.
• Robert Woodland, sentenced to more than 12 years on charges of conspiring to distribute drugs.
• Ksenia Khavana, a Russian-born ballerina and US citizen charged with treason for allegedly raising money for the Ukraine. Khavana was originally accused of “petty hooliganism” in Yekaterinburg for “using course language” in public. But the Beverly Hills, California, spa-operator was later slapped with a treason charge resulting from a $51 donation to a Ukrainian charity.

• Also in Moscow’s custody are three other American men – Gordon Black, and Army Staff Sergeant from Texas; Daniel Schneider, who was caught attempting to sneak his son out of Kaliningrad via a swamp near the Poland border; and David Barnes, an engineer from Texas – each married to Russian wives and who face various domestic charges ranging from spousal abuse to kidnapping.