Brittney Griner Freed From Russian Prison in Exchange for Viktor Bout – Thursday, Russia freed the American basketball star Brittney Griner in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been imprisoned in the United States for 12 years. Joe Biden, who made Griner’s release a top priority after she spent nearly ten months in jail on drug charges, stated in a White House address that he had spoken with Griner and found her to be “in good spirits.”
“She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home after months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held under intolerable circumstances,” he said. “Brittney will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones and she should have been there all along.” But the president expressed regret the deal did not include Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since December 2018 on espionage charges his family and the US government say are baseless.
Biden said: “Sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up. We will never give up.” Griner’s wife, Cherelle, stood beside Biden and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and said she was “overwhelmed with emotion.”
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“The most important emotion that I have right now is just sincere gratitude for President Biden and his entire administration. He just mentioned this work is not easy, and it has not been,” she said. “Today my family is whole, but as you all are aware, there’s so many other families who are not whole. Brittney is not here to say this but I will gladly speak on her behalf and say that BG and I will remain committed to the work of getting every American home, including Paul, whose family is in our hearts today.”
The second such exchange in eight months, following the freeing of Trevor Reed in April, procured the release of the most prominent American detained abroad. Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medalist whose imprisonment on drug charges brought unprecedented attention to the population of wrongful detainees. She was convicted in August and sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony.
Biden’s authorization to release Bout, once nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” underscored the pressure his administration faced to get Griner home, particularly after the resolution of her criminal case and her transfer to a penal colony. An anonymous US official told CNN that leaving Whelan out of the deal had been “a difficult decision” but “it was a choice to get Brittney or nothing.”
The Russian foreign ministry confirmed to state media that Griner had been secretly exchanged for Bout at Abu Dhabi International Airport. The ministry provided no additional information. Russian attorneys for Griner did not respond to a request for comment. An attorney for Whelan stated that he had not been contacted. But, he added, intelligence services typically arranged these swaps behind the scenes.
After months of negotiations, Russian and American officials expressed cautious optimism, with Biden expressing hopefulness in November. A senior Russian official stated last week that a deal is possible before the end of the year. Even so, the fact that the deal was a one-for-one swap was unexpected, given that US officials had been adamant for months about bringing Griner and Whelan home.
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The United States Department of Justice once described former Soviet lieutenant colonel Bout as one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers. He was serving a 25-year sentence for conspiring to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons to be used against Americans, according to US officials. However, the detention of one of the greatest players in WNBA history generated unprecedented public interest in a single detainee case. Griner was taken into custody in February.
Her case emerged as a major inflection point in US-Russia diplomacy at a time of deteriorating relations prompted by Moscow’s war against Ukraine, yielding the highest-level known contact between Washington and Moscow – a call between the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov – in more than five months.
