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    • Paul Whelan says he shared information about Ukraine with the US from Russian prison
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    Paul Whelan says he shared information about Ukraine with the US from Russian prison

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    During his time in a Russian labor camp, Paul Whelan passed information from fellow prisoners serving on the front lines in Ukraine to the U.S., Canada, Ireland and England via secret telephones, he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in his first major interview. since being released from Russian custody in a prisoner swap in August.

    Whelan said about 450 prisoners from his camp had accepted a deal to serve as mercenaries with Russia’s Wagner Group in Ukraine. They then passed information to him via “illegal cell phones,” which Whelan passed on to the four governments, Whelan said in Sunday’s interview.

    Guards in the prison camps “looked the other way,” Whelan told host Margaret Brennan. ‘A Russian prison guard gets $300 to $400 a month. You give him a pack of cigarettes and you can do just about anything you want.”

    After Brittney Griner and Trevor Reed came out, Whelan hit ‘lowest point’

    Whelan, a former Marine from Michigan, was released more than five years after his arrest in Moscow on charges of spying for the US. He was released along with Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained on similar charges in early 2023, and 14 other prisoners in exchange for eight Russians held in the US, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland.

    Whelan was caught red-handed with a USB stick containing classified information in his room at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, Russia claimed. But Whelan was in on a scheme orchestrated by Ilya Yatsenko, a close Russian friend he visited on trips to Russia over the course of a decade, Paul’s brother David Whelan told the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in a previous interview.

    More: North Korean shock troops in Ukraine? South Korea summons Russian ambassador over reports.

    David Whelan said Yatsenko passed the driveway to his brother, who thought it contained photos or something else. Instead, officers broke into Paul Whelan’s hotel room and arrested him.

    Paul Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in prison during a closed-door trial in 2020. He was transferred to IK-17, a prison camp in the Republic of Mordovia, an 8-hour drive from Moscow.

    There, Whelan was cut off from the outside world, he told CBS. But the ambassadors and consular teams from the four countries to whom he passed information visited him regularly and sometimes brought him mail from home, he said.

    Whelan watched as other Americans who spent less time in Russian prisons were released in prisoner exchanges while he remained in captivity. Basketball star Brittney Griner was released in late 2022, nine months after she was arrested for drug smuggling when two small vape pens and cannabis oil were found in her bag at Moscow airport.

    And Trevor Reed, also a former Marine, was traded in April 2022 for a Russian drug dealer held in a US prison. Reed served nearly three years in a Russian prison after his arrest in August 2019.

    Whelan said in the CBS interview that he was told he would be leaving with Reed. Then he heard on the prison radio that the exchange had already taken place, and that he was not involved.

    The news was “devastating,” he said. When Griner was released months later and Whelan remained behind, he reached his “lowest point” – American officials told him there were no more Russian prisoners he could trade for his freedom.

    Whelan’s release months later was a “diplomatic feat,” President Biden said at the time. Whelan was greeted by the President and Vice President Harris as he stepped off the plane on U.S. soil.

    Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her via email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.

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