WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medallist Brittney Griner sits in the plane as she flies to Abu Dhabi to be exchanged for Russian citizen Viktor Bout. Photo / AP
Month after month, as US diplomats pushed for the release of Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan from Russian prisons, they received the same infuriating answer: If you want both prisoners, we want Vadim Krasikov as part of the deal.
Krasikov is an assassin who murdered a Chechen fighter in a park in Berlin in broad daylight in 2019, a brazen killing that German authorities say was committed at the behest of Russia’s intelligence services. Convicted and sentenced to life in prison in Germany, Krasikov was not in US custody to be traded to Russia.
It was, the Americans thought, hardly a viable request for a swap that would include Griner, a WNBA star, and Whelan, a former US Marine, who were being detained on what Biden administration officials considered trumped-up charges.
US officials felt out their German counterparts to see if they might agree and were hardly surprised when Berlin refused to release what they considered a cold killer. Trying to be creative, the Americans even explored some sort of three-way deal that would give the Germans something in return, but that did not go anywhere, either.
Privately, some of the administration’s diplomats concluded that the insistence on freeing Krasikov was a stalling tactic by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who they believed was determined not to deliver any kind of political victory to President Joe Biden before the midterm elections in the United States last month. Others believed the Russians were serious and saw it as a face-saving way for Moscow’s security services to give up Whelan, whom they convicted of espionage despite flat denials from Washington that he was a spy.
Either way, how Biden came to agree to a swap that freed Griner but not Whelan was a tale of feints and intrigue carried out through secret negotiations and public posturing, all against the backdrop of a brutal war in which US-armed Ukrainians were battling Russian invaders. At the end of the day, according to senior US officials directly involved in the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe delicate diplomacy, it left the president with the unpalatable choice of liberating one American while leaving another behind.
Griner arrived in the United States early Friday, landing in San Antonio, where she will receive medical evaluations at Brooke Army Medical Centre and be reunited with family, a relief for Biden and his team. Whelan remains in a dismal Russian prison, his long-term fate unknown as his frustrated family waits and while the president vows to redouble efforts to bring him home.
In Moscow on Friday, Putin said that Russia was continuing to communicate with US officials and that “everything is possible” regarding further prisoner exchanges. US officials have delivered a similar message, pledging to continue talks in the hope of bringing Whelan home as soon as possible.
The two imprisoned Americans offered distinct cases that were eventually linked and then unlinked. Griner, detained on minor drug charges a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, was seen as a hostage in the midst of the confrontation with the West over the conflict. Whelan, the former US Marine, had been in prison since 2018 on espionage charges long before the war in Ukraine.
The outlines of a possible agreement were on the table as far back as last spring. Interacting through intelligence agencies, the Russians made clear that they were willing to trade Griner for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in Thailand in 2008 and serving a 25-year sentence in a US prison. But they were not willing to include Whelan in the package deal.
Bout was important to the Russians because of his ties to the security services. While he is not known to be close to Putin, US officials said, Bout has connections in the Russian power structures. And Russia had made a martyr out of Bout over the past 14 years; freeing him would allow Putin to boast about finally bringing a patriot home.
To the Russians, trading Griner for Bout was a swap of two criminals, according to US officials. Whelan, on the other hand, was supposedly a US agent, in the Russian telling, and so only another agent or someone of equivalent importance would merit giving him up. The Americans do not currently have a Russian spy in custody to trade. And that is where Krasikov came in.
Krasikov, who called himself Vadim A. Sokolov, was arrested after two witnesses saw him throwing his bike and a bag into the Spree River after twice shooting the victim, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen separatist commander who fought against Russian forces in the early 2000s and was labelled a terrorist by Russian state media. Police divers later found a Glock 26 pistol in the river in the downtown park.
Frustrated by the demand for a swap they could not make, American officials broke with years of tradition by telling reporters that they had made a “substantial” offer to the Russians, making clear that Biden would trade Bout for Griner and Whelan. They hoped the public pressure would move the Russians off their insistence for Krasikov and into a deal.
It did not — for many months.
But just after Election Day in the United States, Russian contacts delivered a new message, raising the possibility of excluding Whelan from a deal and instead focusing exclusively on Griner. If that were the case, the Russians said, Moscow might consider Bout a fair trade.
The disparity of their offences was vast: Bout was an illegal arms merchant to some of the world’s most violent forces, including some intent on killing Americans; Griner was detained for travelling with vape cartridges containing hashish oil. But it was the first time that the Russians had made what the American diplomats considered a real counteroffer, if they were serious about following through.
At the White House, the possibility prompted a series of high-level meetings and discussions, some of which included Biden, about whether to test if the Russians were serious about making a one-for-one deal, much like they had months before in a swap that freed Trevor Reed, another imprisoned American.
The situation was fluid and uncertain. Even as they discussed their options, Whelan’s family said publicly that he had missed two calls with them, raising fears for his safety and reports that he had been moved from his prison to a hospital in Russia.
Had the Russians done something to Whelan? That could have made a trade for Griner impossible but also would have seemed unlikely given that it was the Russians who now seemed eager to make a deal. For days, work on the potential deal for Griner stalled as the Americans worked to figure out what had happened. Officials eventually determined that Whelan had been taken back to prison, and he called his family.
At a meeting in the Oval Office early last week, Biden was ready to sign off. The Justice Department had weighed in against the deal, communicating their objections through Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. But the department makes a policy of opposing prisoner trades across the board, arguing that it undercuts the US justice system. The State Department, on the other hand, recommended the deal, as did other officials who concluded that the deal from the Russians was never going to change and so it was time to take it. The president agreed.
The careful negotiations, however, almost unravelled a few days later as Biden hosted President Emmanuel Macron of France for a state dinner at the White House. A journalist for CBS News contacted the White House with reporting that the administration was preparing to swap Griner for Bout.
Premature disclosure, officials feared, was likely to scuttle the deal. They asked the network to hold off. According to CBS, it “agreed to a White House request to hold the reporting because officials expressed grave concern about the fragility of the then-emerging deal”.
With that resolved, officials moved forward. Armed with the president’s go-ahead, they pressed their Russian counterparts: Are you serious about this? The answer came back more quickly than the US diplomats expected, and it was more definitive. Yes, they said. The day after the state dinner, Biden signed an executive grant of clemency for Bout but held it back while aides set the transfer in motion.
Wary of undercutting the deal, the US diplomats carefully made one last appeal for Whelan, asking the Russians if there was anyone other than Krasikov whom they might want in exchange for both Whelan and Griner. They got a firm no, but the Russians did not use the effort as an excuse to back out of the developing arrangement for Griner.
Within days, plans were set for two planes to take off — one from Moscow, where Griner had been transferred, and another from the United States, with Bout.
One question to resolve: Where to make the swap? In the Cold War days and even as recently as a Russian-American spy swap in 2010 under President Barack Obama, prisoners were exchanged in the middle of Europe: the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam, Germany, as made famous in the Tom Hanks movie Bridge of Spies, or in Vienna, as with the 2010 trade.
But because of US and European sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February, Moscow was not willing to send a plane anywhere in Europe for fear that it could be seized. Even long-neutral Switzerland had joined sanctions against Russia, while Helsinki — a prime Russian-American meeting site during the Cold War — was no longer acceptable because the country is joining Nato.
The compromise became the United Arab Emirates, a small Gulf state that is friendly with both Washington and Moscow. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the UAE, had raised Griner’s case with Putin during a meeting in October, and so the Emiratis were happy to facilitate the transfer. The arrangements were made: Both sides would send planes to Abu Dhabi, the capital.
Cherelle Griner, Griner’s wife, was invited to the White House on Thursday morning ostensibly to meet with Sullivan for an update. When she arrived, however, Sullivan surprised her by taking her to the Oval Office, where Biden broke the news that Brittney Griner was coming home. At that point, Griner was on the ground in Abu Dhabi, while Bout’s plane was 30 minutes out.
Once he landed, his clemency document was finalised and the swap proceeded, captured in grainy video distributed by Russian state media. It showed Griner and Bout being walked to the middle of a dusty tarmac, escorted by officials of their countries. After a brief stop, Griner was led away in one direction, while Bout left with Russian officials in another.
Biden and Cherelle Griner celebrated before cameras in the Oval Office. But once the journalists were ushered out, the president had another, grimmer task: He had to call Whelan’s sister to explain why he was not coming home, at least not yet.
Written by: Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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