A court in Russia on Thursday found US basketball player Brittney Griner guilty and sentenced her to nine years in prison, in a case that has mobilized government diplomats Joe Biden, moved the sports community and once again once again divided American society.
Griner was detained on February 17 at Sheremetievo International Airport near Moscow on charges of carrying cartridges of hash oil, a substance in Russian illegal cannabis, to be used in an e-cigarette.
The player’s sentence will be announced later this Thursday (4).
If the situation already looked bad, given the possibility of being sentenced to up to ten years in prison, the case took on another dimension a week after being arrested, when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine.
In the weeks that followed, Biden called Putin a war criminal, Russia claimed the US promotes banditry, and relations between the two countries teetered on the brink of collapse. Bad news for anyone who expected diplomatic intervention from the US government to get out of prison.
Griner was in Russia to play for the country’s women’s basketball league during the off-season period of the sport in the US, something that players often do to supplement their income, given the lower salaries compared to the men’s modality of the sport. In Russia, she played for the UMMC of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains region, closer to Kazakhstan than eastern Europe.
Over 2 meters tall, Griner, 31, plays in the US for the Phoenix Mercury and is considered one of the stars of American women’s basketball since he played in the college league at Baylor University. In addition, she is a two-time Olympic champion (Rio-2016 and Tokyo-2020). In the protests against the death of George Floyd in 2020, she joined the group of athletes who spoke out against the American anthem being played before the games. “I honestly don’t think we should play the national anthem during our season. I think we should oppose it,” she said at the time.
Shortly after being arrested, Griner pleaded guilty before a court of law for bringing the hash oil into the country, but has always maintained that he did not want to. Last week, she stated that she did not know how the substance ended up in her luggage. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say it was because I packed my bags in a hurry,” she said. She has a doctor’s prescription to use marijuana medically in the United States to treat chronic pain. The defense argued in the lawsuit that this is common among elite athletes.
After her arrest, Griner received public support from her US team, the WNBA, the women’s basketball league, and a number of athletes, who urged the US government to get her out of prison.
The player’s wife, Cherelle Griner, even said in mid-June that she had no confidence in the Biden administration to resolve the situation, but changed her stance after receiving a call from the president himself and his deputy, Kamala Harris. In the call, the agent promised that she worked to “secure the release as soon as possible” of the player.
Biden mobilized his State Department and made an offer to the Kremlin: the exchange of Griner and ex-soldier Paul Whelan, imprisoned since 2018 on espionage charges, for Viktor Bout, the imprisoned US arms dealer most famous for inspiring the film “Lord of Arms”, 2008, with Nicolas Cage.
The deal has not yet been sealed. According to the American TV network CNN, citing sources in the US government, Russia wants to include in the exchange package a former colonel convicted of murder in Germany, Vadim Krasikov.
Like much that involves diplomacy in the United States, the case also sparked internal debate, which heated up after the arms dealer’s offer to release him. Former Republican President Donald Trump, accused by opponents of playing Putin’s political game in the US, condemned the efforts made by the US government to release the player — with the usual exaggeration right to say, for example, that Griner entered the country ” loaded with drugs.”
“She came loaded with drugs into hostile territory, where they are very vigilant about drugs, they don’t like drugs,” he said. “She’s been caught and now we should get her out of the country? And she makes, you know, a lot of money, I think. We should bring her in by trading her for a cold-blooded killer and one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, [que] killed many Americans, [que] killed a lot of people”, said the former president in an interview with a podcast last Sunday (31).
“And she’s going to get a free ticket, and we’re going to pick her up,” he continued. “He [Viktor Bout] it’s absolutely one of the worst [criminosos] of the world and will win his freedom because a person who appears to be spoiled goes to Russia loaded with drugs.”
At the final hearing in the lawsuit on Thursday, Brittney asked the court not to see her as a pawn in the political game. “I know everybody keeps talking about ‘political pawn’ and politics, but I hope this is far from this courtroom,” she said. She failed to agree with the Russians.
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