Assailed with questions during her daily briefing to find out if the American president had not made a “bad deal” as the Republican opposition claims, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre did not flinch. The 80-year-old Democrat did not take his decision “lightly”, she assured, and remains “vigilant” after the release of the man who has been nicknamed the “merchant of death”.
Acknowledging that the prisoner swap could “immediately be felt to be unfair or arbitrary”, she explained: “The president (Biden) felt he had a moral obligation. (…) It was either Brittney or no one . And we won’t apologize for that.”
“I honestly think that Viktor Bout has spent enough time in prison for the crimes he committed,” judge Shira Scheindlin, who handed down his sentence, told AFP. Arrested in Thailand in 2008, he had been sentenced to 25 years in prison in the United States, of which he will have served about half.
“Dumb”
“He was not a terrorist himself. He was an arms dealer. There are arms dealers everywhere, including in the United States and France,” she added.
This is not the opinion of many tenors of the Republican Party, starting with former President Donald Trump, who denounced on his Truth Social network a “one-way market”, “stupid” and “embarrassing”. Others, such as Republican parliamentarian Nicole Malliotakis, stress above all that the transaction does not settle the fate of another American detained in Russia for four years, former soldier Paul Whelan: “An American + Marine + is left behind in another Bad deal made by Biden,” she said.
The head of the American diplomacy Antony Blinken stressed to him that Russia wanted to treat the two cases in a different way, because of the “false accusations of espionage” that Moscow weighs on Paul Whelan. All the more reason, according to Judge Shira Scheindlin, to also demand his release: “I don’t know if he did what (the Russians) say, but if he was indeed a spy, then you would have had a spy against an arms dealer, that seems a bit more relevant,” she said.
“Position of strength”
For Will Pomeranz, director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, a think-tank, the case of the former American soldier, sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison, will now be difficult to settle: his “best chance” to leave Russia “was to be part of the exchange with Brittney Griner”, whose case sparked a strong mobilization, especially in the world of women’s basketball.
The athlete was arrested in February in Moscow with a vaporizer and liquid containing cannabis, a product banned in Russia. In August, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Will Pomeranz reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “in a strong position”, facing a Joe Biden who got involved in a very personal and very media way for the release of Brittney Griner.
The United States, like other democracies, sometimes bow to prisoner exchanges considered unbalanced, but whose governments consider that they meet strong expectations of their public opinion.
In 2011, Israel freed more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for a single soldier, Gilad Shalit.
As far as Brittney Griner is concerned, the strongest criticism remained mainly concentrated, at least in the first hours following the announcement, in the conservative camp.
Is it indicative of public opinion? An American football player, Micah Parsons, apologized on Twitter for a message in which he was outraged that the United States “abandoned a Marine”.
Faced with an onslaught of criticism, he went back on his remarks to say he was “extremely happy” with the release of the 32-year-old double Olympic champion.