The sister of an American schoolteacher imprisoned in Russia says her family feels “collectively stabbed in the back” after Thursday’s major prisoner swap deal.
The multinational deal saw U.S. nationals including a Wall Street Journal reporter and a former U.S. marine finally released from Russian custody. But Marc Fogel, who has been detained in Russia for three years, is still locked up.
The 63-year-old was arrested in a Moscow airport in 2021 for having medical marijuana in his luggage which his family and lawyer say was prescribed to him for severe spinal pain. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison on drug charges, and he remains incarcerated in a penal colony.
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“The last 36 hours have been gut-wrenching,” his sister, Anne Fogel, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday. After seeing reports that some kind of swap deal was imminent, Fogel said she and her family began calling lawmakers and diplomats. “We really hoped that they were going to get Marc on the plane,” she said.
Those hopes were soon dashed. “Marc called me yesterday morning and when I realized that he was in Rybinsk, I knew that things were not going well, because he should have been gone,” Anne Fogel said. “It’s been a rollercoaster. No sleep. I feel like we’ve been kind of collectively stabbed in the back.”
She acknowledged that a request has been made to release Marc Fogel on “humanitarian” grounds, but Russia has “no history of ever doing that.” “It’s kind of insult to injury that he still has not been designated as wrongfully detained.”
On Thursday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on described Marc Fogel as wrongfully detained for the first time at a White House press briefing and said the administration is “actively working to get his release from Russia,” but the State Department has not yet officially designated him wrongfully detained.
Anne Fogel said her family hasn’t received “any adequate answers” as to why her brother hasn’t received that designation, which was given to WNBA star Brittney Griner when she too was arrested at a Moscow airport in February 2022 after cannabis oil was found in her luggage. “Their cases are nearly identical,” Anne said. Griner was freed in December that year in a prisoner swap for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
“It’s been one of the most frustrating times of my life, to not be heard or taken seriously,” Anne Fogel said, fighting back tears. “We don’t have the NBA and we don’t have The Wall Street Journal backing us, so we’ve been—Marc has been largely ignored. He needs the [wrongfully detained] designation because he needs real medical treatment.”
She said he’s fallen “multiple times” in the Russian penal colony, explaining there’s “lots of ice” where he is. “He spent the last month in a ‘hospital’ where there are no doctors, but he’s given multitudes of injections, and not having any clear understanding of what they’re giving him,” she said. “You can imagine how terrifying that would be.”
“We absolutely wanted Marc to be included, but it just wasn’t going to happen,” a senior Biden administration official told CNN in a statement.
