materials. In 2009, Vasilenko was convicted and sentenced again for allegedly trying to bribe facility officials. According to media reports (which cite anonymous sources in Russian intelligence), Vasilenko was included in the list for the swap due to a personal request from a CIA officer who knew Vasilenko when he was posted in the U.S. under diplomatic cover from 1976 to 1981. Others held by Russia Alexander Sypachev () was a colonel in the Russian intelligence service who was arrested after delivering a report to a secret location in 2002. He was sentenced to eight years for spying for the CIA. He was reported to have been considered for a swap but was not among the four Russians released. Six others were considered for exchange as an even 11:11 swap, but were not exchanged in Vienna. Political ramifications While there was speculation that the arrests of the alleged spies, which occurred barely 72 hours after President Medvedev's White House visit, might cast a shadow over President Barack Obama's effort to improve relations between the US and Russia, on June 30, 2010, the US administration said that it would not expel Russian diplomats and it expressed no indignation that Russia had apparently been caught spying on it. On June 29, 2010, The Guardians comment said: "Revelations about spy rings are the last thing a politician like Medvedev, who presents himself as a moderniser, needs"; in its July 1, 2010, issue, The Economist wrote: "The revelations have caused embarrassment in Moscow, not so much because Russia was caught spying on America, but because it did it so clumsily. Old KGB spies this week lamented the decline in professional standards. But the scandal has rather more serious domestic implications too. It punctures the mystique that helped allow the security services to gain such clout under Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president and present prime minister and a former KGB spy. The story discredits him and his circle of siloviki, the former and present members of the security services. Being laughed at is worse than being feared." On February 1, 2011, Ireland's cabinet made a decision to expel a Russian diplomat from the country – the first time since 1983, after the Irish government, based on an investigation conducted by the Garda Síochána Special Detective Unit (SDU), concluded that the Russian security agent based at the Russian embassy in Rathgar gathered details from six genuine