Russia arrests US man on drug trafficking charges
A US national has been arrested on drug trafficking charges in Russia, the latter nation said on Tuesday, bringing the number of Americans detained by authorities in Moscow to at least three as tensions rise over the Ukraine war.
Robert Romanov Woodland, 32, was arrested on 5 January, Reuters reported, citing the Russian news website Mash, which said Woodland faced a 20-year prison sentence if convicted.
A district court in the northern Moscow suburb of Ostankino ruled on Saturday to keep Woodland in custody until 5 March on charges of attempted large-scale production and sale of illegal drugs.
No other details were immediately available. Neither the US state department nor US the embassy in Moscow has commented, and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, did not address it at a press conference later on Tuesday in Tel Aviv.
Russian media said that the name of the accused matches that of a US citizen interviewed by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2020, who said he was born in the Perm region of Russia’s Ural mountains in 1991 and adopted by an American couple at the age of two.
The man said he later traveled to Russia to find his birth mother, and after locating her he decided to stay in the town of Dolgoprudny, 15 miles north of central Moscow. He said he worked as an English teacher at a local school.
Woodland’s arrest comes as relations between the US and Russia grow increasingly strained as the war in Ukraine continues. Efforts by the Biden administration to secure the release of two other Americans jailed in Russia – the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former marine
Paul Whelan – were rejected last month, and Woodland’s detention will fuel analysts’ fears that they are being held as bargaining chips.
Russia freed the American basketball star Brittney Griner, who spent almost 10 months in jail on drug charges, in December 2022 in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” who was held in a US prison for 12 years.
At the time, Joe Biden expressed regret the deal did not include Whelan, 53, a corporate security executive from Michigan who was jailed in 2018 on espionage charges his family and US officials say are false.
“While we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up. We will never give up,” the president said, although in an interview last month Whelan, who is serving a 16year sentence, said he felt “abandoned and betrayed” by the US.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said last month his government had talked with the US over the two detainees and hoped to “find a solution”.
Gershkovich, 32, is the first American journalist to be held in Russia on spying charges since the end of the cold war. He was arrested in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg on a reporting trip in March 2023 and has been held behind bars since. Like Woodland, he faces a 20-year prison term if convicted.
No trial date has been set, and the US government has declared him to be wrongfully detained.