ROSTOV-ON-DON (Sputnik) — On Wednesday, the Izvestia newspaper reported that Yaroshenko had written a letter to the US president, in which he asked to transfer him to Russia, while his family had appealed to the US leader for a pardon.
"It was a conscious decision, he never addressed the US presidents, but this is probably either from despair or from the last hope that they will pay attention. On the eve of the meeting of the two presidents, he went in for it, he was undecided for a long time. Many times he wrote to our president, but when Obama was in charge of the country, he categorically refused to write to him, and he strongly hopes that this issue will be raised at the upcoming meeting of Putin and Trump," Viktoria Yaroshenko said.
She added that her husband's morale had been severely undermined by his mother's death. According to her, Lyubov Yaroshenko appealed to the US leader shortly before her death, so the request for the release of the Russian pilot was "the last will of the deceased person." Victoria Yaroshenko expects that the US president will take this fact into account, and also stated that she hopes for Trump's human feelings.
On May 21, Russia's High Commissioner for Human Rights Tatiana Moskalkova sent an appeal to Trump to pardon Yaroshenko. She said she had met with the pilot’s wife, who informed her about poor nutrition in the US prison and the impossibility to deliver parcels from the family. On June 1, Moskalkova said she expected the answer in August. According to Viktoria Yaroshenko, there has been no response from the presidential administration yet.
Yaroshenko, sentenced to prison on allegations of conspiring to import more than $100 million worth of cocaine into the United States, was arrested in Liberia in 2010 and handed over to the US authorities, prompting protests from Russia. The pilot has claimed he was mistreated while in US custody, while his health suffered significantly as he was denied proper medical care. In April 2016, the Appeal Court of New York denied revising the pilot's sentence. In April, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that arguments made to reverse Yaroshenko’s conviction lacked merit. In a March letter to Sputnik, the jailed pilot said the court ignored a lot of evidence that proved US prosecutors and drug enforcement authorities had fabricated the case against him.
