Basketball star free after prisoner exchange
American basketball star Brittney Griner headed home yesterday, freed from Russian prison in exchange for the US releasing notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in the culmination of an eight-month saga of high diplomacy and dashed hopes.
But the US failed to win freedom for another American, Paul Whelan, jailed in Russia for nearly four years.
The deal, the second in eight months amid tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, secured the release of the most prominent American detained abroad and achieved a top goal for US President Joe Biden.
Yet it carried what US officials conceded was a heavy price.
Biden’s authorisation to release Bout, the Russian felon once nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” underscored the heightened urgency that his administration faced to get Griner home, particularly after the recent resolution of her criminal case on drug charges and her subsequent transfer to a penal colony.
Griner, who also played pro basketball in Russia, was arrested at an airport there after Russian authorities said she was carrying vape canisters with cannabis oil.
Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, Baylor University Allamerican and Phoenix Mercury pro basketball star, whose arrest made her the most high-profile American jailed abroad.
Her status as an openly gay black woman, locked up in a country where authorities have been hostile to the LBGTQ community, injected racial, gender and social dynamics into her legal saga and brought unprecedented attention to the population of wrongful detainees.
The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed the swap, saying in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that the exchange took place in Abu Dhabi and that Bout had been flown home. Both Russian and US officials had conveyed cautious optimism in recent weeks after months of strained negotiations, with Biden saying in November that he was hopeful that Russia would engage in a deal now that the midterm elections were completed.
Even so, the fact that the deal was a one-for-one swap was a surprise given that US officials had for months expressed their determination to bring home both Griner and Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed in Russia since December 2018 on espionage charges that his family and the US government have said are baseless.
“We’ve not forgotten about Paul Whelan,” Biden said.
“We will keep negotiating in good faith for Paul’s release.”
But his brother said his family fears he will not be released for years, even as they supported the US government’s agreement to the prisoner exchange that freed Griner.
US officials said Russia refused to consider including Whelan in the Griner deal, calling it a “one or none” decision.
His brother, David Whelan said: “I think we all realise that the math is not going to work out for Paul to come home anytime soon, unless the US government is able to find concessions.
“And so I think we aren’t really sure what the way forward is.”
The family’s pain doesn’t change their belief that the Biden administration “made the right choice” to exchange Bout for Griner, David Whelan said.