MOSCOW (Reuters) -The defence team of former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, sentenced last year to 16 years in a Russian jail, will ask a Moscow court to move him to the United States to serve his sentence, the RIA news agency reported on Wednesday.
Russia convicted Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, of spying last June and sentenced him to 16 years in jail. He denied spying and said he was set up in a sting operation. Washington demanded his release.
Whelan had said he hoped to be freed as part of a prisoner swap, a topic President Vladimir Putin discussed with his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden at a summit last month.
"We are preparing a petition to the Moscow City Court about transferring Whelan to serve his sentence in the United States," RIA cited Olga Karlova, one of his lawyers, as saying. "He asked us about this when we met him in the prison colony."
Whelan is being held in a high-security prison eight hours drive from Moscow.
The TASS news agency cited another lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, as saying that the petition would request that Whelan be transferred to the United States or one of the other countries where he holds citizenship.
Zherebenkov said the defence team would file the petition in two to three weeks.