Paul Whelan heads home, after 2,043 days in a Russian prison

For a long time, Mr Whelan was relentlessly upbeat about his fate.

He was convinced the US government would get him out, even as relations between Russia and the West slid from awful to much worse.

Conditions in his prison camp, IK 17, were tough, locked up with “child rapists and murderers” as he once put it.

He studied Russian – even Tajik – wrote letters, read spy novels.

The rest of his time was spent sewing clothes in a prison workshop and the nights were interrupted, regularly, by the guards.

They would shine a torch in his face to check he had not escaped.

Despite all that, Mr Whelan told me he made a habit of singing his four national anthems out loud each morning – to annoy those guards and to keep his spirits up.

He called himself a political hostage and told me repeatedly the FSB agents who took him – even the judge who convicted him – had all assured him he would be swapped.

It is why he didn’t bother appealing his sentence.