{"id":14214,"date":"2025-02-25T12:50:49","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T12:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=14214"},"modified":"2025-02-25T12:50:49","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T12:50:49","slug":"this-russian-tech-bro-helped-steal-93-million-and-landed-in-us-prison-then-putin-called","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=14214","title":{"rendered":"This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Vladislav Klyushin was<\/span> having, by any measure, an awful day. The judge in his case had brushed aside his lawyers\u2019 arguments and his friends\u2019 appeals for leniency. She handed down a tough sentence: nine more years in US federal prison, on top of an order to forfeit a fortune, $34 million.<\/p>\n

But if Klyushin was upset about the ruling, he didn\u2019t show it. The then 42-year-old tech executive from Moscow seemed upbeat\u2014quick with a smile on his pinchable cheeks and unerringly polite, just as he had been during his arrest near a Swiss ski resort in March 2021, his months of detention in Switzerland, his extradition to the United States that December, his indictment and trial on hacking and wire fraud charges, and his swift conviction. Klyushin \u201chad a confidence all along that eventually the Russians would get him back,\u201d one of his defense attorneys told me. He seemed certain that his protectors in the Kremlin would spare him from serving out his full sentence.<\/p>\n

There were times when that certainty seemed cocksure. America\u2019s federal prison system held 35 Russian nationals. Surely not all of them were getting traded back. His family and friends were distraught. Within less than a year, though, Klyushin was proven right. On August 1, 2024, he was unshackled and put on a plane back to Moscow\u2014one of the 24 people involved in the largest, most complex US-Russian prisoner exchange ever.<\/p>\n

You probably heard something about the swap<\/a>. It\u2019s the one that brought Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan home to the United States\u2014and sent back to Russia a Kremlin-linked assassin and a husband-and-wife duo of spies who were so deep undercover that their kids didn\u2019t learn they were Russian until they got on the plane. In coverage of the exchange, Klyushin was treated as a footnote. That was a mistake, if an understandable one. And not just because he was at the center of one of the bigger insider trading cases of all time.<\/p>\n

The escalating conflict between the US and Russia has played out in all sorts of ways over the past decade. One is in global financial markets, with America and its allies walling more and more of Russian industry off from the international economy. There are always creative individuals who can find cracks in that wall, though, and Klyushin sure seems to have been one of them. You don\u2019t have to squint too hard to see his scheme\u2014which ultimately netted $93 million\u2014as a way to bring capital into Russia, despite the global blockade. The contest has also been evident on the streets of Moscow, where a secretive Kremlin security force has grabbed American citizens, who are charged with bogus crimes, and then dangled them in trades for killers, spies, and associates of the Kremlin. It\u2019s kidnapping, hostage taking, and it\u2019s effectively all being done on President Vladimir Putin<\/a>\u2019s orders. Oftentimes, Americans are taken precisely for their value as assets to be later exchanged\u2014to get back people like that assassin, or this financial crook, Klyushin. He wasn\u2019t at the very top of Moscow\u2019s trade list. But Klyushin was much closer, and more important to the Kremlin, than either side was willing to admit.<\/p>\n

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