u.s. would never give up on whelan. moscow is treating whelan different than griner, totally illegitimate reasons. whelan said he was surprised that he had been left behind. jim sciutto reports. reporter: paul whelan s odyssey in russia s criminal justice system began on december 28th, 2018. former marine, he was arrested in moscow during a trip for the wedding of a fellow marine to a russian woman. ended up taking a group of them as part of their tour through the kremlin. russia s federal security service accused him of being a spy. whelan had visited russia before, including as early as 2006 while on a two-week deployment from iraq. whelan moved to the u.s. as a child. he has u.s., canadian, british, irish citizenship. whelan joined the marine
butina who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to influence u.s.-russia relations. she s been held for five months and russia is not happy. what this looks like, at least, is the russians simply doing tit for tat. what they ll do in response and other countries have done in response is just arbitrarily pick up someone who isn t responsible or guilty of anything just to create pressure and leverage on us. reporter: so, russia isn t saying what they allege they have on whelan, and the state department isn t saying whether russia s being forthcoming with information. what we do know is what we hear from our analysts here, even based on what we know about whelan now, they re saying they feel it s highly unlikely he would be involved in the u.s. intelligence community. first of all, because of his dishonorable discharge from the military but also they say this is just not the way a u.s. espionage operation would work, that they wouldn t just send somebody over there as a sort of con