US citizen detained on drug smuggling charges in Russia released ahead of talks between Moscow, Washington
A U.S. citizen arrested in Russia earlier this month on drug smuggling charges has been released from Russian custody.
Kalob Wayne Byers, 28, was detained on Feb. 7 at the Vnukovo airport in Moscow after cannabis-laced marmalade was allegedly found in his luggage by customs officials. Byers was traveling from Istanbul with his Russian fiancée, who was also taken into custody.
It was not immediately clear whether Byers' fiancée, identified by Russian media as Naida Mambetova, was also released. She was placed in pre-trial detention on the same charges.
Russian authorities said Byers had attempted to smuggle a "significant amount" of drugs into the country. He was taken into custody on drug smuggling charges, punishable by up to a decade in prison.
Byers, now freed from Russian custody, is staying in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as he awaits a flight home, his parents wrote on social media, according to Russian independent news outlet Meduza. A U.S. official confirmed that Byers was released to the embassy late on Sunday evening, according to The Associated Press.
Russia freeing Byers appears to be part of an effort to ease tensions between Moscow and Washington ahead of talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
When asked about Byers, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that Moscow expects "to discuss restoring the entire complex of Russian-American relations" at the Saudi Arabia meeting "so certain events can be viewed in this context."
Tensions between the two countries had already begun to soften in recent weeks.
Last week, President Donald Trump upended three years of U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia, stating that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to begin negotiations on ending the war.
Americans being arrested in Russia has become increasingly common in recent years, as relations between Moscow and Washington have soured because of Russia's war against Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
Some Americans have been released in prisoner exchanges, including Marc Fogel, a teacher from Pennsylvania who was jailed in Russia on drug charges. He was freed last week.
Fogel was detained at a Russian airport in August 2021 when traveling to work at a school in Moscow. He was sentenced to 14 years behind bars for possession of drugs, which his family said was medically prescribed marijuana.
He was released and flown back to the U.S. earlier this month in an exchange that included returning Alexander Vinnik, a Russian cryptocurrency expert who faced Bitcoin fraud charges in the U.S., to Russia.
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Minnesota's slain Democratic leader lived the political divisions in the US every day
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34 minutes ago
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Forget the American flag. These are the flags to fly on July 4 to celebrate liberty
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is trying by framing the 8 p.m. curfew she implemented as remaining in effect 'to curb bad actors who do not support the immigrant community.' Demonstrations don't happen as often — or ever — in most of the U.S. Meanwhile, the Bay Area hosts demonstrations seven days a week. So for starters, the mere sight of thousands of people filling the streets is foreign, intimidating and a little bit scary to people who spent Saturday at Little League or cutting the grass in Kansas. As he assumes a larger profile on the national stage during this latest public tussle with Trump, Newsom needs to better explain the nuance of protests. Democrats to the left of Fetterman often call a protest 'peaceful' even if there are images of protesters lighting cars on fire and breaking windows and vandalizing businesses and property. Those acts are dismissed off-handedly as 'property damage' and not violence. (Tell that to the family businesses that have to replace their windows the next morning.) Yes, the vandals doing that damage constitute only a small fraction of the demonstrators, but they receive a disproportionate amount of air time — and that only helps Trump. Their actions need to be acknowledged more forcibly, called out as unlawful and very publicly prosecuted. Newsom understands this. 'If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop,' Newsom said in his nationally broadcast speech Tuesday, noting that 220 people had been arrested in Los Angeles and local law enforcement was reviewing video of the chaos 'to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.' His challenge is that parsing those differences between protesters is difficult and rarely done. I first wrote about those differences while covering dozens of Iraq War protests two decades ago. Many mass demonstrations in the Bay and L.A. often follow a similar arc: Thousands of people will peacefully and boisterously march in the streets for hours without incident. Chanting, waving signs, talking smack about the government (all protected under the First Amendment, as is waving a Mexican flag.) Then, in their wake, usually as the first wave of peaceful demonstrators is headed home, a 'breakaway' contingent of demonstrators unaffiliated with the main organizers will start breaking windows, tagging buildings with graffiti and engaging in other random acts of vandalism that have nothing to do with the theme of the demonstration other than being a different expression of rage. Often, they self-identify as anti-capitalist 'anarchists.' During the 2003 anti-war demonstrations, anarchists told me they were frustrated with conventional peace events and called for a breakaway march to 'bring some militancy' to the anti-war movement. 'What does (the main march) threaten? It can just be ignored like any other position people are taking,' said one anarchist, who asked not to be identified. Yet organizers of the main demonstrations rarely called out the thugs piggybacking on their protest. Some told me they were threatened when they did. So instead, when pressed, many often exonerated the splinter groups and their actions to me by saying, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.' In other words, all kinds of protests are valid. There has long been a reluctance among activists to criticize fellow travelers, even those whose vandalism devalues the message the main demonstration is trying to send. Unless protest organizers do something to self-police these demonstration hijackers, their powerful, existential message — Trump is becoming a fascistic autocrat before our eyes — will be diluted. Or worse, ignored. It's time to pull the dandelions sprouting among the flowers. And while I'm hesitant to jump on the blame-the-media bandwagon, we own some responsibility here, too. Television coverage of these mass demonstrations, which provides most of the protest images consumed on all platforms, is rarely nuanced enough to draw the distinctions between the main marchers and the unaffiliated vandals gravy-training on their earnest intentions. TV reports invariably focus on the broken windows in the wake of an otherwise peaceful march rather than the message that the marchers were making about Trump's budding fascism. If it bleeds — or is broken — it leads on TV news. If Newsom and protest organizers don't mute the vandals this summer, then Trump wins the fight for public opinion. Those 'anarchists' will become Trump's best weapon as their behavior is contributing to the false narrative that American cities are out of control. Yeah, the anarchists are angry. A lot of us are angry. But burning and breaking stuff is damaging the common cause we share. We are right — and constitutionally endowed — to take to the street on behalf of law-abiding immigrants. But you're not helping if you're busting up stuff, or not calling out those who do. See something? Say something. And that starts with Newsom, who has to remember that he's now talking to the rest of America. Not just California.
