The US and Russia have exchanged jailed US basketball star Brittney Griner for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, held in an American prison for 12 years. “She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home,” US President Joe Biden said at the White House Thursday morning alongside Griner’s wife, Cherelle. “After months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held under intolerable circumstances, Brittney will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones, and she should have been there all along.” Biden acknowledged that Griner’s release was occurring while Whelan remained imprisoned, saying that Whelan’s family “have to have such mixed emotions today.”
Biden said efforts to bring Griner home took “painstaking and intense.
Griner was arrested since February at a Moscow airport for possessing cannabis oil and last month sent to a penal colony.
Griner’s arrest in Russia sparked diplomatic drama between the US and the Kremlin that played out alongside Russia’s war in Ukraine. At the same time that the US enacted crippling sanctions in response to the Ukraine war, US diplomats kept open lines of communication with Moscow over prisoner negotiations to try to secure the release of both Griner and Whelan.
The biden administration proposed a prisoner exchange last July, aware Moscow had long sought Bout’s release.
Russia’s foreign ministry confirmed the swap and said it had taken place at Abu Dhabi airport.
Viktor Bout sold arms to warlords and rogue governments, becoming one of the world’s most wanted men.
Dubbed the “merchant of death” for gun-running in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian exploits inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie ‘Lord of War’, which was loosely based on his life.
His secretive career was brought to an end by an elaborate US sting in 2008, when he was arrested at a hotel in the Thai capital Bangkok, to the anger of the Russian government.
He was extradited two years later and has spent the past 12 years languishing in an American jail for conspiring to support terrorists and kill Americans.
