‘Monotonous and Filthy’: Paul Whelan’s Life in a Russian Prison (www.nytimes.com)
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The former U.S. Marine describes the moment of his arrest and the long years waiting for his release.

Speaking in Washington in his first lengthy newspaper interview since he was released on Aug. 1 in the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, Mr. Whelan, 54, said he thought the arrest, in late December 2018, was a prank. It wasn’t.

Within hours, he found himself locked into a 9-foot-square cell in Moscow’s notorious, high-security Lefortovo Prison, where Soviet-era political prisoners had been tortured. So began Mr. Whelan’s odyssey through what he described as Russia’s harsh, often surreal, state-manipulated criminal justice system. His ordeal lasted, by his own count, five years, seven months and five days.

At Lefortovo, he survived an emergency hernia surgery in the middle of the night at a hospital where, he said, half the overhead lights did not work, and when the doctors dropped instruments on the floor, they picked them up and kept going. Sent to a labor camp after his conviction, he endured a diet of bread, tea and a watery fish soup that seemed better suited as cat food, as well as once-a-week cold showers and long days sewing buttons and buttonholes on winter uniforms for government workers.

. . .

Mr. Whelan’s arrest was a new chapter in what is called hostage diplomacy, when citizens of the United States or other nations are arrested and imprisoned on sham charges in order to be exchanged for a person or some concession.

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