Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.