The Kremlin has revealed it is ready to talk about a possible prisoner swap involving US star basketball player Brittney Griner, but has strongly warned Washington against releasing details publicly.
Griner, a two-time U.S. Olympic champion and member of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, has been detained in Russia since February 17, when Moscow airport police say they found vaping cartridges containing cannabis oil in his luggage.
A judge on Thursday found the 31-year-old athlete guilty of drug possession and trafficking and sentenced her to nine years in prison. This sensitive file comes amid strong tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s military action in Ukraine.
“Microphone Diplomacy”
In an extraordinary move, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week, urging him to accept a deal under which Griner and Paul Whelan, an American imprisoned in Russia for espionage, would be released.
Both Lavrov and Blinken were in Cambodia on Friday for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Blinken didn’t even glance at his Russian counterpart as they took their place at the East Asia Summit.
The Russian foreign minister told reporters that Blinken did not try to contact him while they were attending the ASEAN meeting.
Lavrov added that Moscow was “ready to discuss” a prisoner swap, but the topic should only be discussed through a dedicated Russian-American forum that US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to create when they met in Geneva in June 2021.
“If the Americans try again to engage in public diplomacy and make raucous statements about their intention to take certain actions, that’s their business, I would even say their problem,” Lavrov said. Americans often struggle to keep calm and professional work agreements. »
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the same point more harshly, saying that “the United States has already made mistakes in trying to solve such problems through ‘microphone diplomacy.’ They didn’t solve anything that way.”
People familiar with the US proposal have revealed that Moscow is considering exchanging Griner and Whelan for a notorious Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout. He is serving a 25-year sentence in the United States after being convicted of conspiracy to kill American citizens and aiding a terrorist organization.