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Greek Court Rules for Russia in Fight Over Cybercrime Suspect

The Greek police detained Aleksandr V. Vinnik last year on an American warrant that accuses him of running a Moscow-based Bitcoin exchange that laundered money.Credit...Giannis Papanikos/Associated Press

MOSCOW — A Greek Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in a computer crime case may return to Russia, rather than extradite to the United States, a potential witness in the investigation into Russian hacking during the 2016 American presidential election.

The Greek police detained the man, Aleksandr V. Vinnik, last year on an American warrant that accuses him of running a Moscow-based Bitcoin exchange that laundered as much as $4 billion in illegal funds.

The warrant made no mention of election hacking. But Mr. Vinnik is accused of operating the exchange, BTC-e, at a time when, American prosecutors say, hackers used such funds to finance the electronic break-in at the Democratic National Committee and other targets. The practice was described in an indictment obtained by the special counsel investigating Russian election meddling, Robert S. Mueller III.

Mr. Vinnik has been languishing in a Greek jail cell since July 2017, when the authorities arrested him as he was vacationing in a small beachside village in northern Greece. It was one of a series of American moves against Russians described as cybercriminals as they traveled.

In Mr. Vinnik’s case and in two others in Spain and the Czech Republic, the Russian authorities countered with competing extradition requests asserting that the Russians had also committed crimes at home, and that they had not come to light before they left the country.

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Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece, left, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in 2015.Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko

Far-fetched as it may seem, the legal maneuver has worked. And it put European governments in a tug of war between Moscow and Washington over Russians suspected of being computer criminals. Spain and the Czech Republic eventually extradited the suspects to the United States.

The American authorities had been pressing Greece to hand over Mr. Vinnik, and Greece initially appeared willing to comply. In October, a three-member panel of judges in the northern city of Thessaloniki backed the American extradition request.

But since then, the case has taken on a series of unusual twists.

After Mr. Vinnik’s lawyers filed an appeal to the Greek Supreme Court, France also demanded his extradition, claiming he had bilked around 100 French citizens by launching cyberattacks through his Bitcoin platform. In July, the judges in Thessaloniki reversed course and agreed to extradite him to France.

That ruling dealt a fresh blow to the tenuous relations between Moscow and Athens, which has long courted Russia as an ally.

Earlier that month, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had drawn Vladimir V. Putin’s wrath by expelling two Russian diplomats and refusing entry to two others. He acted after Athens said it had uncovered evidence of a Kremlin-backed campaign to manipulate regional politics.

Mr. Tsipras accused Russia of fomenting raucous protest rallies in Greece and Macedonia over a referendum in Macedonia to change the country’s name, which would put it on a path to join NATO. Russia, which vigorously opposes an enlargement of the Western alliance, retaliated by expelling Greek diplomats, and accused Washington of “putting pressure” on Greece.

When the Thessaloniki court then refused to hand Mr. Vinnik to Moscow, Russia’s foreign ministry warned it would consider reprisals.

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Archive YouTube footage featuring Yevgeniy A. Nikulin.

Mr. Tsipras’s government insisted it wanted to maintain friendly relations. And less than a month later, on July 30, the Thessaloniki court changed course again and accepted Russia’s request that Mr. Vinnik be extradited to Russia.

On Tuesday, the Greek Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling backing the decision. The court is scheduled to issue a final ruling next week. Greece’s justice minister will make the final decision on where Mr. Vinnik will be extradited.

In an interview last year, Mr. Vinnik’s Russian lawyer, Timofey S. Musatov, said his client’s case in the United States was unrelated to electoral hacking. Russian prosecutors filed an extradition request on a fraud charge. Mr. Musatov could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

In July, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers and revealed details of their operation, including the use of computer servers paid for “using cryptocurrency.” At the time, Mr. Vinnik’s BTC-e platform was the largest virtual currency exchange in Russia.

In the cases in Spain and the Czech Republic, relatives and Russian lawyers said the American authorities were seeking access to the suspects for information about election hacking, though the Department of Justice made no such assertions in indictments.

A Russian lawyer representing one suspect, Yevgeniy A. Nikulin, wrote an open letter to President Trump warning that his client would be forced to falsely confess to election meddling if extradited to the United States from the Czech Republic. The wife of another suspect, Pyotr Y. Levashov, said the Spanish police told her at the time of the arrest that he was wanted in the United States for election hacking.

The Department of Justice sought Mr. Nikulin over accusations that in 2012 he hacked three American technology companies: LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring. The allegations against Mr. Levashov related to the spam promotion of penny stocks and pharmaceuticals.

Liz Alderman reported from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Russian Hacker, Wanted In U.S., May Go to Russia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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