United States In Talks with Russia To Free WNBA Player Brittney Griner
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The United States has finally admitted that they have made overtures to obtain the release of gay WBNA player Brittney Griner who appeared in court for the first time in Moscow today for illegal drug possession.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday that the United States had “put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago” in talks with Russia to gain the release of the detained basketball star Brittney Griner and the former Marine Paul Whelan.
The United States and Russia have “communicated repeatedly and directly on that proposal,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference in Washington, declining to discuss the details of the talks. He said he expected to speak soon with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, about the matter.
While Mr. Blinken never said the words “prisoner swap,” many experts have said that such a deal may be the only path for Ms. Griner to obtain her freedom.
Mr. Blinken’s comments came the same day that Ms. Griner, who has been detained in Russia on drug charges, told a court outside Moscow that she had been tossed into a bewildering legal system with little explanation of what was happening and what she might do to try to defend herself.
Mr. Whelan was sentenced last year on espionage charges.
Ms. Griner described arriving in Russia after an exhausting 13-hour flight — and soon after recovering from Covid — and finding herself in an interrogation in which much of what was being said remained untranslated. She said she was also told to sign papers with no explanation of what they were.
It was her first court testimony about her arrest in a case that has taken on outsize importance because of the war in Ukraine. The conflict has created the deepest rift between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War.
When Ms. Griner arrived for the hearing wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, she had her wrists shackled in front of her, and she was flanked by a coterie of Russian security agents, including some wearing bulletproof vests, their faces covered by balaclavas.
The Russian authorities detained Ms. Griner, 31, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, about a week before President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in February. She was accused of having two vape cartridges of hashish oil in her luggage when she arrived at an airport near Moscow. Russia did not make her detention public until after the invasion began.
