Brittney Griner arrives at court near Moscow on Friday. Credit… Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters
As Russia continues to bomb Ukraine and NATO leaders return home from their annual summit reaffirming their solidarity with the beleaguered country, WNBA star Brittney Griner arrived in a Russian court on Friday for the start of her trial on drug charges in the , which raised fears that the Kremlin would use it as leverage in the war.
Ms Greener’s detention, which began a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than four months ago, comes at a sensitive geopolitical moment during the war and amid Russia’s strained diplomatic relations with the United States and some European countries. Legal experts said her trial was almost certain to end in a conviction despite clamor in the United States for her release.
The trial also comes after rocket strikes on an apartment tower and a recreation center in a Ukrainian coastal town southwest of the Black Sea port city of Odessa early Friday killed at least 17 and wounded dozens of others, according to Ukrainian officials.
Ms. Greener is one of the most decorated basketball players in the world — a seven-time WNBA All-Star, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first openly gay athlete to be endorsed by Nike. She traveled to Russia after a two-week hiatus to play for UMMC Yekaterinburg, a powerhouse professional basketball team. Many WNBA players supplement their league offseason income by playing internationally, where top-level athletes can command salaries of around $1 million.
Russian customs officials said they found vape cartridges containing traces of hashish oil in Ms Greener’s luggage when she went through a checkpoint at an airport near Moscow on February 17. The drug charges she faces carry a sentence of up to 10 years in a penal colony.
The US State Department announced in May that Ms Greener had been “wrongfully detained”. It transferred responsibility for the case to the government office that directs and coordinates United States diplomatic and strategic efforts in hostage cases abroad.
“Britney has been classified as wrongfully detained since April 29, which means that the US government has decided that she is being used as a political pawn and as a result is engaged in negotiations for her release regardless of the legal process,” Ms. Griner’s agent, Lindsey Kagawa Colas, said in an email Wednesday. “As such, our expectations — including Britney’s family — remain that President Biden will strike a deal to bring her home.”
News about Ms. Greener is scarce and mostly distributed by Russian state media. She communicated with fellow WNBA players through letters and emails, according to the Associated Press. But her wife, Cheryl Greener, told the AP that a recent, long-planned phone call between the two did not take place because of a logistical error at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
The Kremlin appears interested in linking her fate to that of Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer who is serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison for conspiring to sell weapons to people they said planned to kill Americans. Russian officials have been pushing Mr Booth’s case for years, and in recent weeks Russian media have directly linked his case to Ms Greener’s.
Some, including the state news service TASS, have even claimed that talks with Washington about a possible swap are already underway, something US officials would not confirm. But the Biden administration, while under pressure to release Ms. Greener, does not want to create an incentive to arrest or abduct Americans abroad.
Alexander Boykov, a lawyer for Ms. Griner, said Monday that he expected the trial to last up to two months.
Add Comment