Artyom Uss, the son of a Russian regional governor who was set to be extradited from Italy to the United States to face charges of violating an embargo against Venezuela and bank fraud, has escaped from house arrest near Milan, Italian media reported on March 23.
Uss disappeared after he removed an electronic bracelet, reports by La Republica, La Stampa, and ANSA said, adding that police are looking for him.
Italian officials have yet to make a statement on the situation.
Two days earlier, a court in Milan approved a motion to extradite Uss to the United States, where he would face decades behind bars if convicted.
Uss was arrested in October at a Milan airport at the request of the United States. Shortly after he was detained, a court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant for Uss, accusing him of money laundering. The move appeared aimed at heading off his extradition to the United States.
Uss, whose father, Aleksandr Uss, has served at the governor of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai region since 2018, asked to be handed to the Russian authorities in January. The court in Milan rejected his request and on March 21 approved his extradition to the United States on charges of violating an embargo against Venezuela and bank fraud.
But the court ruled against handing him over on charges of smuggling military technology to Russia and money laundering. The judges wrote in a statement that they refused extradition due to a lack of evidence for the first charge and the issue of double jeopardy for the second.
U.S. prosecutors said in October that another suspect in the case against Uss, Yury Orekhov, was arrested in Germany.
A 12-count indictment was unsealed on October 19 in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charging the two men along with three other Russian nationals -- Svetlana Kuzurgasheva, Timofei Telegin, and Sergei Tulyakov. In addition, two Venezuelan nationals -- Juan Fernando Serrano Ponce and Juan Carlos Soto -- were charged for brokering illicit oil deals for a Venezuelan energy company.
According to the statement, Uss and Orekhov owned Nord-Deutsche Industrieanlagenbau GmbH (NDA GmbH), which bought U.S. military technologies and dual-use technologies, including semiconductors and microchips that are used in military jets, missile systems, modern ammunition, radars, and satellites. Kuzurgasheva served as the company's executive director.
The items bought in the United States by the company in question were then passed on to Russian companies -- Radioavtomatika, Radioexport, and Abtronix -- owned by Telegin and Tulyakov.
The U.S. Attorney General’s Office said the items were discovered in Russian military vehicles and in equipment captured by Ukrainian forces during Russia's ongoing full-scale aggression against Ukraine.
According to the indictment papers, Uss and Orekhov also used NDA GmbH to illegally smuggle hundreds of millions of tons of oil from Venezuela to companies in China and Russia, including one that might be linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is under U.S. and European Union sanctions over Russia’s war in Ukraine.