Freed US Marine veteran Trevor Reed is now “back in the USA,” his mom said early Thursday — as a dramatic new video showed the Hollywood-like moment when he was swapped for a Russian drug trafficker in a prisoner exchange.
“It’s been [a] very exciting day for The Reed family,” the 30-year-old Texan’s mom, Paula Reed, tweeted of the return of her son who spent nearly 1,000 days in a Moscow prison on trumped-up charges.
Newly-released footage showed the prisoner swap on the tarmac of a Turkey airport in a moment his dad, Jerry, had said was “like you see in the movies.”
Reed, dressed all in black, could be seen walking from his jet and across the tarmac — passing Konstantin Yaroshenko, 53, the Russian drug trafficker who was freed from his 20-year sentence in federal prison in Connecticut.
As his father noted, it was like a scene from a movie like 2015’s “Bridge of Spies,” the Tom Hanks-starring Steven Spielberg flick about a previous prisoner swap that freed American U-2 spyplane pilot Francis Gary Powers.
Reed was then flown home in a jet with a special isolation tent over fears he has tuberculosis, his family told NBC News. He arrived at an airport in San Antonio early Thursday.
Before his arrival, his dad said, “I think it’s going to really hit home for him and for us when we finally get to see him and touch him.”
The swap was nearly three years in the making, with President Biden saying Wednesday that the negotiations “required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”
The timing was particularly surprising given escalating tensions with Russia amid its brutal war on Ukraine.
Reed had been behind bars since 2019, accused of assaulting two cops in Moscow while blackout drunk — getting sentenced to nine years after a trial that the US ripped as a “theater of the absurd.”
He recently went on hunger strike to complain of brutal conditions in his lockup.
Yaroshenko was serving a 20-year federal prison sentence in Connecticut for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine around the globe. The Justice Department had called him “an experienced international drug trafficker.”
With Post wires
