(WASHINGTON) — Against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol at dusk, freed American Paul Whelan, who just completed a government resettlement program in Texas following his return from wrongful detainment in Russia, thanked the lawmakers who worked to help secure his release.
Whelan praised a “bipartisan effort that brought me home” after spending the day meeting with lawmakers who took up his case from his home state of Michigan and elsewhere.
“The Michigan delegation brought me home here,” he said.
“You know, it was five years, seven months and five days,” he added of his time in Russian custody. “I counted each one of them.”
The former Marine revealed he spent the final five days in the Russian prison in solitary confinement.
“I couldn’t leave my cell,” he said, “but I made it home.”
Whelan wouldn’t preview what’s next for him — offering only that he needs a new car and that suddenly he’s in a place with electric and driverless vehicles — but said he’s involved in discussions over how to support other wrongfully detained Americans around the world.
“We’re coming for you,” Whelan said to those Americans. “The United States is not going to let people like me, Marc [Fogel], Trevor [Reed], Brittney [Griner, who was released in December 2022] languish in foreign prisons. It might take time, but we’re coming for them and everybody else.”
Whelan acknowledged the reporters he recognized by name or face, recalling the precise month he spoke with them via a smuggled phone from prison. He thanked them for reporting on his case.
He also thanked “all of the people that work for agencies that I will never meet, people that I will never know, their staff members, everyone that’s been involved at every level.”
Rep. Haley Stevens, who represents Whelan’s district in Congress, told ABC News she expects to lean on him for the complex policymaking to mitigate foreign detentions like his.
“Well, he might not know it, but I plan to be in touch with him for a very long time to come, as long as he’ll welcome it, because there’s a lot to learn from his experience,” she said.
She noted that Whelan’s case was “the first one” of a series of high-profile detentions in Russia, including Griner and Evan Gershkovich, and it “certainly changed the relationship that the United States had with Russia, even before the war in Ukraine began.”
“Our message to Russia is that when it comes to your shenanigans and your illegal and unjust and unlawful behavior, we, as the United States of America, are united. We will fight for our people,” she said. “We will bring them home, and we will win.”
Whelan returned to the United States on Aug. 2 after five-and-a-half years in a Russian penal colony.
Russian authorities released Whelan, as well as American journalists Gershkovic and Alsu Kurmasheva, in a multi-country deal that freed eight Russian prisoners abroad. The 26-person swap was the largest between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War.
Whelan was arrested in Moscow in 2019 on charges of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Whelan, who frequently visited the city, was deemed as wrongfully detained by the U.S. Department of State.
The former Marine wasn’t the only former Russian captive on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British national whose release was secured by the U.S., met with lawmakers. Kara-Murza was imprisoned in Russia for two years for his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
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