Laurent Vinatier, the French researcher sentenced to three years in prison in Russia as a "foreign agent" for collecting military information, has been released, as confirmed by Russian intelligence services. Vinatier has been released in an "exchange" sealed between Moscow and Paris, which allowed the repatriation of Russian basketball player Daniil Kasatkin, detained in June at Charles de Gaulle airport at the request of U.S. justice, suspected of belonging to a hacker network.
Ostensibly thinner, dressed in black clothes, Laurent Vinatier was photographed leaving a Russian prison under police escort and was transported directly to a Moscow airport. There he boarded the same plane on which Kasatkin had traveled, this time bound for Paris, where he was received at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Brigitte Vinatier, the researcher's mother, celebrated the agreement for his release as "a kind of Christmas miracle" and thanked President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to "mobilize" his diplomatic staff after acknowledging that "it would be useful" to speak again with Vladimir Putin in the context of the peace agreement in Ukraine.
The 49-year-old French researcher, married to a Russian woman and father of two children, worked for the Swiss NGO Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, as an expert for over two decades in post-Soviet Russia. During the trial, he pleaded "guilty," despite denying being a spy and stating that his goal was to "represent Russia's interests in international relations."
Since Vinatier's arrest in 2024 at a restaurant where he had arranged a meeting in Moscow, accused of espionage, the French government did not stop condemning his detention as "arbitrary," demanding his release, and denouncing the legislation on "foreign agents" in Russia as "a systematic violation of fundamental freedoms."