A resolution supporting Butler native Marc Fogel, who has been detained in Russia for nearly three years, has advanced in the Senate, and we hope it’s the first step toward the government taking real action to secure his freedom.

In the Sunday, April 21, edition of the Butler Eagle, we learned a concurrent resolution that calls on President Joe Biden and his administration to prioritize the freedom of Fogel moved out of committee last week. Fogel, who was arrested in August 2021 in Russia, was accused of drug smuggling for having about a half-ounce of medical marijuana he’d been prescribed for back pain.

He was sentenced to 14 years in prison and is being held in a penal colony.

The Senate resolution, which was sponsored by Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and co-sponsored by five others, including Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., calls on the Biden administration to prioritize Fogel’s release, along with the release of other Americans held in Russia. There is an identical resolution in the House of Representatives that was co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Kelly, R-16th, and more than a dozen other lawmakers.

The news that the resolution advanced out of committee follows a report last month from the House Appropriations Committee that mandates the State Department to provide reasoning for not having designated Fogel as wrongfully detained since his imprisonment.

The concurrent resolution is nonbinding, but its symbolic value is huge.

As his mother, Malphine Fogel, noted in a recent editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, neither Biden nor U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has ever publicly mentioned Marc Fogel, despite the similarities between his case and that of WNBA player Brittany Griner, who was arrested entering Russia with a THC vaporizer cartridge and eventually freed in a prisoner swap.

He deserves better than that, and the concurrent resolution is a good step toward that goal.

— JK