WNBA star Griner freed in swap for Russian arms dealer

WNBA star Brittney Griner on Thursday in a high-profile prisoner exchange as the US released notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Washington: Russia freed WNBA star Brittney Griner on Thursday in a high-profile prisoner exchange as the US released notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

But the US failed to win freedom for another American, Paul Whelan, who has been jailed 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 President Joe Biden.

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Yet it carried what US officials conceded was a heavy price. “She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home,” Biden said from the White House, where he was accompanied by Griner’s wife, Cherelle, and administration officials. 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 All-American 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. Biden spoke by phone with Griner, and she was expected back in the US within 24 hours, Biden said.

US officials said she would be offered specialised medical services and counselling. Both Russian and U.S. 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.

A top Russian official said last week that a deal was possible before year’s end. 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.