MOSCOW. July 12 (Interfax) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed decrees pardoning 20 convicts, including Alexander Zaporozhsky, Igor Sutyagin, Sergei Skripal, and Gennady Vasilenko, the Kremlin press service said on Friday.
It was reported earlier that Sutyagin, Zaporozhsky, Skripal, and Vasilenko had been swapped for ten Russians accused by the U.S. of spying for Russia.
Igor Sutyagin, who formerly headed the military-technological and military-economic policy sector within the foreign political research department at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the U.S. and Canada Studies, was found guilty of high treason through spying and sentenced to 15 years in a strict security penitentiary by the Moscow City Court in April 2004.
Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former colonel from the Russian special services, was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to 18 years in prison by the Moscow District Military Court in 2003. The court found that Zaporozhsky had provided U.S. special services with secret information on active members of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) working under cover in the U.S. and on three U.S. citizens serving as sources for Russian special services.
Sergei Skripal, a retired colonel of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU), was convicted by the Moscow District Military Court to 13 years in prison in 2006. The court found that Skripal had been recruited by British intelligence services and had passed them classified information since the mid-1990s.
Gennady Vasilenko, a former KGB officer and former deputy chief of the NTV-Plus television company's security service, was convicted in 2006 for illegal storage of weapons, an attempt to manufacture an explosive device, and resistance to police. No spying charges were brought against him.
At the same time, Zaporozhsky and Vasilenko were mentioned in various reports highlighting the exposure of FBI officer Robert Hansen as one collaborating with Russian intelligence services in the U.S. in 2001.