On paper, its handover to Russia looks like a bargaining chip. Russian professional basketball player Daniil Kasatkin was released from French prisons where he had been since last summer, in “exchange” for the return to France of researcher Laurent Vinatier, as Russia confirmed this Thursday. “Thanks to the hard work of his lawyers, Daniil Kasatkin was released from prison yesterday (Wednesday) evening. He boarded a plane and has already landed in Moscow,” his lawyer told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
Daniil Kastkin is a professional basketball player who played in the Russian local championship, with the exception of a year of study in Philadelphia at Penn University in 2019. “He fell in love with basketball at a young age while watching the film Space Jam, with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. His agent found him a high school in the United States, then he was taken to a university in Pennsylvania with a sports scholarship,” his partner told a Russian newspaper after his arrest, as we explained last October when his defense claimed his innocence.
Member of a hacker network?
While he was traveling to France with his fiancée whom he had just proposed to, the basketball player, who until recently played with the Moscow MBA-MA team, was arrested at Parisian Roissy airport at the request of the United States, then placed under extradition arrest on June 23, 2025. Why? American justice suspects him of having been part of a network of hackers who, via ransomware, attacked more than 900 companies, associations and government entities between 2020 and 2022.
Daniil Kastkin is accused of negotiating the payment of the ransoms. “I have no link” with this affair, he affirmed before the French courts. His lawyer, Frédéric Belot, estimated that “no evidence” was provided by the American justice system, stressing that the incriminated IP address was in fact “a VPN to which everyone can connect”. “He is accused of having been a negotiator,” Frédéric Belot summarized in our columns.
At the end of last October, French justice gave a favorable opinion for his extradition to the United States. But according to Frédéric Belot, cited by several Russian media, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu never signed the document for his extradition. According to the same Russian media, Daniil Kasatkin is now in Russia.
