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For Brittney Griner, there is one silver lining to Thursday’s harsh nine-
year prison sentence handed down by a Russian judge.

Meaningful negotiations for a deal to bring the WNBA star home can finally begin.

In an attempt to foster the perception that Griner was receiving a fair
trial and that their efforts to hold her were legitimate, Russian
officials had insisted for weeks that they wouldn’t entertain a prisoner exchange until she was tried and sentenced. With Griner’s drug trial over, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Friday that the Kremlin is “ready to discuss this issue” but warned that Russia won’t
tolerate public negotiations.

“There is a specified channel that has been agreed upon by [President
Putin and President Biden], and despite some public statements, this
retains its relevance," Lavrov said during a news conference at a
diplomatic summit in Cambodia. “If the Americans still decide to engage in public diplomacy and make resounding statements about what they’re going
to do now, then that is their business and even their problem.”

The U.S. has been eager to negotiate for weeks with pressure mounting on
Biden to secure the release of Griner and fellow American prisoner Paul
Whelan. That urgency only increased on Thursday when judge Anna Sotnikova rejected Griner’s emotional apology and plea for leniency for the “honest mistake” of bringing less than a gram of cannabis oil into Russia last February.

Standing outside the courthouse, Elizabeth Rood, Deputy Chief of Mission
at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, called the ruling a "miscarriage of
justice." Soon after that, Biden himself released a statement calling
Griner’s sentence “unacceptable” and promising that his administration
would “work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney
and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken had already sent a public message to
Griner’s supporters that the U.S. was doing all it could to negotiate a
deal. On July 27, Blinken took the extraordinary step of revealing at a
news conference that the U.S had made a “substantial proposal” for Griner
and Whelan “weeks ago” but hadn’t received a formal Russian response.

Blinken declined to share details of the offer, but he has not denied
reports that Biden has signed off on trading a notorious Russian arms trafficker who has long been high on the Kremlin’s prisoner exchange wish
list. Viktor Bout is serving a 25-year sentence in an Illinois federal
prison for conspiring to kill Americans and sell weapons to Colombian terrorists.

Former State Department foreign services officer David Salvo told Yahoo
Sports that Blinken’s public acknowledgment of an offer was a reaction to
the attention that Griner’s detainment has garnered. The U.S.’s inability
to secure Griner’s release has drawn criticism from her family and
friends, the American media and celebrities such as LeBron James, Kim Kardashian and Amy Schumer.

“The messaging from Tony Blinken has been for domestic political
consumption,” said Salvo, the deputy director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and an expert on Russian foreign policy. “There has been so much American attention on this case that I think he and senior administration officials felt like they couldn’t keep negotiations entirely behind closed doors. They had to show they were doing something. There were too many
people who were browbeating them for not doing enough.”

And yet while Salvo understands the Biden administration’s rationale for
going public with its offer, he admits he’s “pessimistic” about how that
will impact diplomatic negotiations. Salvo says the “harsh reality” is
that Russia can afford to drag out negotiations and let the pressure on
the Biden administration continue to rise in hopes of prying more
concessions from the U.S. than just the release of Bout.

“I would be very surprised if it ends up a 2-for-1 deal at this stage,”
Salvo said. “The Russians will milk this for all it’s worth.”

Comments:

Warren
13 hours ago

Let it take nine years. There are other Americans who are detained right
now on same or lesser charges and there are no negotiations for them.

https://news.yahoo.com/why-the-harsh-reality-is-that-a-deal-to-bring-home- brittney-griner-may-take-awhile-163151615.html

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