The President of the United States, Joe Biden, said on Thursday that Brittney Griner is on her way to the United States after being released from a Russian prison where she served her sentence.
The WNBA player and two-time Olympic gold medalist had been in jail since February when she was arrested at a Moscow airport with vape cartridges full of hash oil. Since then, she has been kept there. CNN and CBS say that Griner was set free as part of a prisoner swap with the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
This is a day we’ve worked towards for a long time,
Biden said at a news conference on Thursday announcing her release.
She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home,
Biden tweeted, alongside photos of Griner’s wife, Cherelle at the Oval Office.
Moments ago I spoke to Brittney Griner.
She is safe.
She is on a plane.
She is on her way home. pic.twitter.com/FmHgfzrcDT— President Biden (@POTUS) December 8, 2022
Griner had just moved to a Russian prison colony to get ready for the start of her nine-year prison sentence.
Griner was the most well-known person from the United States to be detained in a foreign country. She was a WNBA star, had won two gold medals in the Olympics, and was a Black lesbian woman. Only a few short weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, she was put in jail.
President Joe Biden said that Brittany Griner is “in good spirits” and “relieved to finally be heading home,” but that the last few months have been “hell” for her and her family.
The fact remains that she’s lost months of her life experiencing needless trauma,
Biden said.
She deserves space, privacy, and time with her loved ones to recover and heal from her time being wrongfully detained.
Cherelle Griner thanked President Joe Biden’s administration and everyone else who helped get her wife out of jail.
Today is just a happy day for me and my family, so I’m going to smile right now,
she said.
The WNBA Commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, said in a statement that she was thankful to the Biden administration and “everyone who helped bring BG home today.”
There has not been a day over the past ten months where we all haven’t had Brittney Griner on our minds and in our hearts and that has now turned into a collective wave of joy and relief knowing that she will soon be reunited with her family, the WNBA player community, and her friends,
Engelbert said.
G has shown extraordinary courage and dignity in the face of enormous adversity.
CNN says that the deal was made at the Abu Dhabi International Airport.
Because Bout was one of the most well-known arms dealers of the 1990s, he was called the “Merchant of Death.” In 2008, he was arrested in Thailand as part of a US operation.
Paul Whelan, a former Marine who has been held in Russia as a prisoner since 2018, was not set free as a result of this deal. After being accused of being a US spy, Whelan was found guilty and given a 16-year prison sentence starting in 2020. The rumors that he was a spy for the US have been denied by his family.
During a speech on Thursday morning, President Biden said that the trade involving Griner “was not a choice about which American to bring home.”
Today my family is whole, but as you all are aware, there are so many other families that are not whole,
Cherelle Griner said.
Paul Whelan’s brother, David Whelan, told CBS News that he is “so happy” to hear about Griner’s release and that the family “does not begrudge her freedom.”
The Biden Administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, and to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to happen,
he wrote.
Even so, the family is “devastated,” and they have asked the U.S. government to “be more assertive” in its efforts to bring Americans who were wrongfully jailed back home. They haven’t found out if Paul Whelan knows about the news yet, but they have said that they “cannot even fathom” how he will feel.
His hopes had soared with the knowledge that the US government was taking concrete steps for once towards his release. He’d been worrying about where he’d live when he got back to the US,
David Whelan wrote.
And now what? How do you continue to survive, day after day, when you know that your government has failed twice to free you from a foreign prison?
he wrote.
I can’t imagine he retains any hope that a government will negotiate his freedom at this point.
