Estonian Interior Minister Hanno Pevkur and the ISS held a press conference in Tartu, which was also attended by ISS chief Arnold Sinisalu, and Kohver himself, the Estonian Public Broadcasting reported. He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour, which was widely condemned in the West as too harsh a sentence. Estonia said he was abducted on its side of the frontier but Russian Federation alleged that he had been caught on its territory carrying a pistol and ammunition, €5,000 (£3,690) in cash and spying equipment.

Aleksei Dressen, the other man in the exchange, is a former Estonian security police official who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Estonian authorities arrived at the swap, which generally passed off at a very conduit within the Piusa River in a woody outer reaches location stationed a number of kilometres less than a Lake Peipus.

Estonia said the entire trial was a farce and Kohver was never in Russian Federation, while Russia said he was captured near Pskov, near the Estonian border.

“I am happy to be home again”, said Kohver, looking well and even cracking jokes after speaking with his wife on the phone.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reportedly said he had been passing information about British and USA spies to Moscow.

There had been speculation, however, that Kohver would ultimately be swapped for a Russian spy held in Estonia. A suspended sentence with a five-year probation period was given to his wife Victoria Dressen who was helping her husband and was detained in the Tallinn airport with electronic media containing secret data before taking a flight to Moscow.

Saturday’s swap followed a deterioration in relations between the two countries, which have also been strained by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.