This marks the first time the US government has publicly revealed any action taken to secure Griner’s release. Source: Tommy Williams, Flickr.
The Biden administration has offered Russia a deal to bring WNBA star Brittney Griner and former US marine Paul Whelan back to the states.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not give information on the proposed deal that was offered weeks ago.
“You’ll understand that I can’t and won’t get into any of the details of what we’ve proposed to the Russians over the course of some many weeks now,” he said.
Russia has been long been interested in the release of Viktor Bout who could potentially be a key figure.
Bout is a Russian arms dealer once labelled as the “Merchant of Death”.
In 2012, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges that he schemed to illegally sell millions of dollars in weapons.
Blinken is expecting to speak with his counterpart in Russia for the first time since before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The last time Blinken had a conversation with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was on 15 February, about a week before Ukraine was invaded.
This marks the first time the US government has publicly revealed any action take to secure Brittney Griner’s release.
Paul Whelan is a corporate security executive from Michigan who was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage charges.
The former marine and his family have strongly maintained his innocence and the US government has denounced the charges as false.
Griner was arrested on drug-related charges at a Moscow airport in February, carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage when she arrived to play basketball in Russia.
If convicted of transporting drugs, she faces up to 10 years in prison.
Griner said at her trial on Wednesday that she did not know how the cannabis oil ended up inside her bag, that she had hastily packed and had a doctor’s recommendation for it.
She said when she was pulled aside after the cartridges were found, a language interpreter translated only a fraction of what was said during her questioning, and she was instructed to sign documents without providing an explanation.
The US government has been resistant to prisoner swaps out of concern it will encourage more hostages being taken and false equivalency.
