U.S. citizen faces drug allegations
No accusation details following man’s arrest
MOSCOW — A U.S. citizen has been arrested on drug charges in Russia, officials said Tuesday, a move that comes amid Russia-u.s. tensions over Ukraine.
The arrest of Robert Woodland Romanov was reported by the press service of the Moscow courts. It said the Ostankino District Court ruled on Saturday to keep him in custody for two months on charges of preparing to get involved in illegal drug trafficking. It didn’t offer any details of the accusations.
The U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports of the recent detention of a U.S. citizen and noted that it “has no greater priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas” but refrained from further comment, citing privacy considerations. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a similar statement.
Russian media noted that the name of the accused matches that of a U.S. citizen interviewed by the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2020.
In the interview, the man said that he was born in the Perm region in the Ural Mountains in 1991 and adopted by an American couple when he was 2. He said that he traveled to Russia to find his Russian mother and eventually met her in a TV show in Moscow.
The man told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he liked living in Russia and decided to move there. The newspaper reported that he settled in the town of Dolgoprudny just outside Moscow and was working as an English teacher at a local school.
The news about the arrest come as Washington has sought to win the release of jailed Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich. The State Department said last month that it had put multiple offers on the table, but they had been rejected by the Russian government.