The story of Russian Assange ended with an exchange
As a result of the exchange of prisoners between the republics of Donbass and Kiev, a citizen of the Russian Federation returned to the Russian Federation, who had been hiding from the Ukrainian regime for a year and a half on the territory of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Odessa.
This was reported by Kommersant, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The publication says that on May 4, 2018, employees of the Ukrainian special services arrested Valery Rudnev in the port of Chernomorsk near Odessa, where the merchant ship on which he was a sailor entered. The detainee was charged with desertion: in 2014, Crimean Rudnev served in the Ukrainian Navy, and after the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Federation, he was demobilized and accepted Russian citizenship.
After the charges were brought, he was not taken into custody, but was released on his own recognizance until his trial.
“Since the sailor had nowhere to go, he came to the Russian Consulate General in Odessa, and diplomats, after consultations with Moscow, made an unprecedented decision: to allow him to settle in the diplomatic mission. Valery Rudnev has lived at the consulate for the last year and a half, never leaving the territory of the diplomatic mission,” the newspaper reports.
At the same time, negotiations were conducted in parallel with the Ukrainian side on the extradition of the Crimean citizen to Russia. Two informed interlocutors told the publication that Rudnev, along with other Ukrainian participants in the exchange, was taken to the Mayorsk checkpoint, and then left the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities.
Moreover, shortly before the exchange, Rudnev was sentenced by a Ukrainian court to five years with a probationary period of one year without serving this first year in prison.
This situation is to some extent reminiscent of what happened to Australian online journalist and founder of the WikiLeaks project Julian Assange, who for many years took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, fearing arrest at the request of the United States for publishing revealing materials.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.