'I fought': Trevor Reed speaks out on how he survived nearly 3 years in a Russian prison

Walking down a lakeside road with his parents,Trevor Reed said the peaceful scene was something he will never take for granted anymore.

When the war in Ukraine broke out in February, Trevor Reed said he believed it meant he likely would never come home.

The American former Marine by that time had been imprisoned in Russia for nearly three years, held hostage after being convicted on trumped up charges. For 985 days, Reed was held in a series of Russian prisons, thrown in isolation cells as small as a closet for 23 hours a day, placed in a psychiatric ward and sent to a forced labor camp he described as looking and feeling like something "out of medieval times.”

But within two months, Reed was home in the United States, freed on April 27 as part of a prisoner swap agreed between the Biden administration and the Kremlin. Reed was freed in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot from Russia who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.

Now back in America and with his family for the first time, Reed is trying to adjust to normal life.