New in SpyWeek: Perfidy at Home and Abroad

The FBI-MagaWorld Smirnov meltdown, a Chinese Snowden, Putin's space bomb, hostage diplomacy, McGonigal's compromise, other espionage arrests and more

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Hostage Diplomacy: A 33-year-old ballerina and spa manager from Los Angeles who gave $51.80 to a Ukrainian charity has been arrested by Russia’s FSB intelligence service on charges of treason. The FSB said Ksenia Karelina, a dual citizen of the United States and Russia, was involved in “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against Russia’s security.”

Ksenia Karelina in better times, from her Facebook page.

Karelina, a dual US-Russia citizen, was charged with treason on ​​the same day that Tucker Carlson conducted a notoriously oleaginous interview with Vladimir Putin, according to a Telegram post by First Department, a collective of lawyers dealing with cases of alleged treason and espionage in Russia. Karelina is charged with sending money to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based non-profit group, the lawyers’ collective added.

White House spokesman John Kirby urged all U.S. citizens in Russia to leave immediately. 

Karelina was taken into custody in Yekaterinburg, the same city where Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested last March on charges of espionage that he and the newspaper deny.  Putin told Carlson that it might be possible to free Gershkovich in exchange for a Russian jailed abroad, Reuters reported. One possible swap: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian serving a life sentence in a German prison for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park in 2019.