Russia: twelve and a half years in prison for an American for drug trafficking

A Moscow court on Tuesday confirmed on appeal the sentence to twelve and a half years in prison of a Russian-American citizen, Robert Woodland, arrested in January and prosecuted in a drug case, in the midst of tension between Russia and the United States. United.

Judge Irina Khorlina decided to leave her sentence in July “unchanged”, which will be carried out in a strict regime colony, according to an AFP journalist present at the hearing. He was convicted of “attempted large-scale drug trafficking,” a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

According to the prosecution, before his arrest, he had recovered from a cache located in a wooded area of ​​Mytishchi, near Moscow, approximately 47 grams of mephedrone, a synthetic drug which he was preparing to sell. His lawyer Stanislav Kchevitski told the journalists present that his client had admitted to being “in possession of drugs” but that “he denies the sale”. “He is a long-time drug addict, he stole drugs from another drug addict and wanted to hide them for the purpose of personal consumption,” according to the lawyer.

That’s when he was arrested, in January. “He was then under the influence of drugs,” added Mr. Kchevitski. “The court did not take into consideration the appeal of the prosecutor who asked to toughen the sentence, nor our observations on the flaws of the verdict, and confirmed it,” commented another lawyer of the accused, Alexei Miroshnichenko . “His condition has not changed since the first instance trial, he feels quite well, we visited him in the pre-trial detention center, he is in Syzran (Samara region, on the Volga),” said said Mr. Kchevitski, adding that he writes letters to his parents in the United States. “He is forbidden to write in English and is forced to ask for help to write in Russian,” according to Mr. Miroshnichenko.

Aged 32, Robert Woodland told the Russian press, a few years before the affair, that he was born in the Russian region of Perm (Urals) and was adopted in 1993 by an American family, before returning to Russia in 2020. . In recent years, several American citizens have been arrested and sentenced to heavy sentences in Russia, with Washington often accusing Moscow of doing this to exchange them for Russians detained in the United States, in the midst of confrontation over the conflict in Ukraine.

In August, American reporter Evan Gershkovich, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, former Marine Paul Whelan, all detained in Russia, were released as part of the largest prisoner exchange deal between Russians and Westerners since the end of the Cold War.

In December 2022, American basketball player Brittney Griner, convicted in Russia on charges of cannabis trafficking, was also exchanged for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in the United States.