Brittney Griner. (Instagram screen capture)
WNBA star Brittney Griner celebrated Aug. 1 the release of American citizens from Russian custody in a historic prisoner swap.
Griner described their release as a “great day” when she spoke with reporters after the U.S. women’s basketball team beat Belgium at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Her team had just qualified for the quarterfinals.
“We’ll talk more about it later. But head over heels happy for the families right now,” said Griner, according to the Associated Press. “Any day that Americans come home, that’s a win. That’s a win.”
Griner spoke with reporters hours after Russia and Belarus released Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, Washington Post contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza and a dozen other people who include Russian opposition figures.
The U.S., Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway, in turn, released eight Russian citizens who had been convicted on charges that include murder and espionage.
One of them, Vadim Krasikov, had been serving a life sentence in Germany after he assassinated a Chechen separatist fighter in Berlin in 2019. Slovenian authorities also released two children of the Russian spies who had been in their custody.
The prisoner swap is the largest between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny earlier this year died in a penal colony. Reports indicate he was to have been among those released in Thursday’s prisoner swap.
Officials at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in February 2022 detained Griner — a Phoenix Mercury center and two-time Olympic gold medalist who is a lesbian and married to her wife, Cherelle Griner — after customs inspectors found hashish oil in her luggage.
A Russian court later convicted Brittney Griner of smuggling drugs into the country and sentenced her to nine years in a penal colony. The Kremlin on Dec. 9, 2022, released her in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer who had been serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S.
Cherelle Griner last month gave birth to a baby boy.
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