A Russian court has sent U.S. citizen Robert Romanov Woodland to pretrial detention for two months on drug-possession charges that could see him imprisoned for up to two decades.
The Ostankino district court in Moscow ruled on January 9 that Woodland must stay in pretrial detention until at least March 5. It said the charges were related to the illegal acquisition or possession of drugs. No further details were provided.
The charges come amid accusations from Washington that U.S. nationals are being detained to be used by Moscow as bargaining chips in exchange for Russians jailed in the United States.
A Facebook account in the name of Robert Woodland indicated that he had been working as an English teacher in Russia and lived outside Moscow.
The Russian news site Mash said Woodland, 32, was detained on January 5.
It noted that a man named Robert Woodland appeared on a state television program in 2020, where he met his Russian mother. Woodland said he was adopted in 1993 by Americans from an orphanage in Russia's Perm region.
Woodland's arrest comes almost three months after a U.S.-Russian dual citizen, Prague-based U.S. journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who has worked for RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service for some 25 years, was arrested in Russia's Tatarstan region.
SEE ALSO: How The Russian State Ramped Up The Suppression Of Dissent In 2023: 'It Worked In The Soviet Union, And It Works Now'Kurmasheva was attending to a family emergency in Kazan, the regional capital, when she was briefly detained while waiting for her return flight on June 2, 2023, at the airport, where both of her passports and phone were confiscated.
After five months spent waiting for a decision in her case, Kurmasheva was fined 10,000 rubles ($110) for failing to register her U.S. passport with Russian authorities.
While waiting for the return of her travel documents, Kurmasheva was detained again on October 18 and this time charged with failing to register as a "foreign agent," a legal designation Russia has used since 2012 to label and punish critics of government policies.
If convicted, Kurmasheva may face up to five years in prison.
SEE ALSO: EU Calls On Russia To 'Immediately Release' RFE/RL Journalist Alsu KurmashevaIn March last year, another U.S. citizen, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, was arrested in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg for spying -- a charge he and the newspaper vehemently deny.
If convicted, Gershkovich may face up to 20 years in prison.
In 2018, Russia arrested a former U.S. Marine, Michigan-based corporate security executive Paul Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian, and Irish citizenship, claiming that he was caught with a flash drive containing classified information.
In 2020, a Russian court sentenced Whelan to 16 years in prison on espionage charge, which he and the U.S. government have denied.
Whelan, who was arrested while visiting Moscow for a friend's wedding, has insisted that he was set up in a sting operation and had thought the drive, given to him by a Russian acquaintance, contained vacation photos.
The detentions of U.S. citizens in Russia come as relations between Moscow and Washington are at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War over the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
More than 30 RFE/RL journalists have been listed individually as "foreign agents" by the Russian Justice Ministry.
RFE/RL says the "foreign agent" law amounts to political censorship meant to prevent journalists from performing their professional duties and is challenging the moves in Russian courts and at the European Court of Human Rights.