Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to act on behalf of the Russian government as a foreign agent, arrived in Moscow on Saturday after being deported from the United States.
Photos showed Butina, wearing a white turtleneck and navy blue sweats she ordered from Amazon, receiving a warm welcome upon her return to Russia.
Butina, who was released from a Tallahassee, Florida, prison Friday morning, was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported.
Her lawyer, Robert Driscoll, expected earlier this week that Butina would be traveling with two ICE agents back to Russia through Europe, but she flew on a direct Aeroflot flight from Miami to Moscow, according to Russian state media. Driscoll told the Washington Examiner that ICE agents would not be accompanying Butina if she were on a direct flight.
The Aeroflot crew upgraded Butina from an economy seat at the back of the plane to business class.
“I would have preferred to be famous for some other reason, but since this is the way it happened — I believe that the world has the right to know the truth about it. I believe that justice will be restored … I’m ready to continue this fight,” she told Russian state media, adding that American rule of law is “just an illusion.”
Her father, Valery Butin, met her at the airport, photos showed.
Butina pleaded guilty in December to failing to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent while she acted at the direction of Alexander Torshin, a longtime figure in Russian politics, since at least 2015.
The U.S. government said Butina “was not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country. She was not a trained intelligence officer … [but her] actions had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”
Driscoll has maintained that Butina was in the U.S. to continue her studies and was not a spy.
