The prisoner swap last week that brought Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich home didn’t free a pair of well-known Russian cybercriminals in U.S. prisons long rumored to be part of the negotiations between Washington and Moscow.
When news of the deal began to leak online last week, multiple media outlets, blogs and social-media posts in the U.S. and Russia erroneously reported that Russian nationals Alexander Vinnik and Vladimir Dunaev, both notorious cybercriminals currently held in American prisons, were involved.
It isn’t clear how much the Kremlin values either man, but their exclusion from the swap could allow the U.S. to offer proposals for a follow-on deal in exchange for Americans still in Russia. Two other U.S.-held Russian hackers, Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin, were exchanged in the recent prisoner trade, which involved 24 people overall.
A Wall Street Journal review of Russian court documents and media reports shows that as many as 20 U.S. and dual U.S.-Russian citizens are detained in Russian jails and labor camps. Those held include teachers, musicians and others who traveled to Russia and became enmeshed in a larger diplomatic struggle.
The family of Marc Fogel, an American high-school teacher, had hoped he might be included in last week’s exchange, only to learn he was still in a Russian prison. Fogel is serving a 14-year sentence after being convicted in 2022 of smuggling roughly 17 grams of marijuana into the country.
Even after the recent trade, there are dozens of Russians in U.S. federal prison or awaiting trial. The Bureau of Prisons said in 2023 it had 25 convicted Russian nationals in custody. Russian officials have indicated that there may be as many as 35 more in other American prisons.
Dunaev and Vinnik have received the most attention as possible trade candidates.
Russia has indicated some interest in Dunaev in the past. Russian diplomats last year visited him, according to Russian state media, and a top Kremlin spokesman discussed his case in the context of U.S. talks concerning an exchange with Gershkovich.
The 41-year-old Dunaev, whom South Korea extradited to the U.S. in 2021, was sentenced in January to more than five years in prison for helping to develop malware code, known as Trickbot, that was used against American hospitals and other businesses.
The Trickbot hacking group and its affiliates collected hundreds of millions of dollars by shutting down emergency rooms, city governments and public schools. For a time, Trickbot was seen by cybercrime hunters as possibly the world’s biggest and most dangerous organized cybercrime group. Dunaev and his co-defendants “caused immeasurable disruption and financial damage, maliciously infecting millions of computers worldwide,” a federal prosecutor said when he was sentenced.
When Dunaev pleaded guilty last November, some observers thought it may have been to help pave the way for a trade. He has a scheduled release date of November 2025 from federal custody. He is currently incarcerated in a low-security prison in California.
Russia’s interest in Vinnik is murkier. The co-founder of popular bitcoin exchange BTC-e used to launder more than $9 billion in transactions, Vinnik has been linked to the theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoin from another exchange, one of the biggest crypto thefts on record, according to prosecutors.
After his arrest in Greece in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin raised his case with then-Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during a meeting in Moscow, Russian state-owned news outlet RIA Novosti reported in 2019, citing a letter from a Russian foreign ministry official.
“A lot of big people used Vinnik’s services,” said Sergey Mayzus, a Russian businessman who owned a payments firm that provided his exchange with banking services and later sued Vinnik for damages related to the shutdown of the exchange.
Last year Vinnik’s former U.S. lawyer, a public defender, campaigned for Vinnik to be considered for a trade, asking a judge to modify a protective order so he could more openly push for a deal involving his client. He was previously offered in a trade proposed by the U.S., the lawyer said in court.
Vinnik pleaded guilty in May and is scheduled to be sentenced in January. His current lawyer, Arkady Bukh, said he is hoping for a sentence of less than 10 years, taking into account his time already being behind bars in Europe and the U.S. after his arrest.
Crypto sleuths for years have sought to find a reputedly hidden trove of bitcoin that Vinnik and the other BTC-e co-founders kept after the exchange was closed. BTC-e’s digital wallets retained tens of thousands of bitcoin after its closure. Two years ago, an unknown person withdrew bitcoin then worth $165 million from one of these wallets, blockchain data shows.
Most swaps involve prisoners who have been sentenced, which may have complicated Vinnik’s chances of being part of last week’s deal, Bukh said.
“His family hoped very, very much that he would be part of the package, but unfortunately it turned out that he wasn’t,” said Frédéric Bélot, a lawyer for Vinnik in a separate case before the European Court of Human Rights. “That is very regrettable.”