Victor Bout has been exchanged for Brittney Griner at Abu Dhabi airport. The UAE capital may become a full-fledged negotiating platform between the U.S. and Russia. Is the exchange of Bout for Griner a “trial balloon,” and will be there more global agreements between the Kremlin and the White House?
According to Letter of law
So, Victor Bout is home. Immediately after the exchange at Abu Dhabi airport, the plane took the most famous Russian prisoner who had served his sentence in the United States to Vnukovo airport. After a long behind-the-scenes negotiation process, Washington and Moscow finally agreed to swap Victor Bout for Brittney Greiner, an American who had served a prison sentence in Russia, through the mediation of United Arab Emirates authorities.
To begin with, let us clarify the legal nuances of such an exchange. It should be noted that neither American nor Russian law, nor international law regulates such exchanges in any way. The exchange of Bout for Griner is a purely political step. From a legal point of view, there was no exchange at all.
What was it then? Victor Bout wrote a clemency petition to U.S. President Joe Biden and Brittney Griner to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then Joe Biden signed a pardon decree for Victor Bout. That is, in fact, the U.S. justice has no more questions for Bout. Vladimir Putin also signed a pardon decree for Brittney Griner. Thus, both Victor Bout and Brittney Griner became free people, free from the claims of justice. Bout and Griner were then taken to Abu Dhabi Airport in the United Arab Emirates, where the exchange took place.
By the way, the pardon has another very important meaning. If Joe Biden had not pardoned Bout, under international law the Russian would have had to serve the rest of his term in Russia. Likewise, Griner should have been transferred to an American equivalent like Sing Sing instead of a colony in Novy Grishino. Since there is a pardon, now neither Bout nor Greiner need serve the rest of their sentence in their home country. Besides, the U.S. news agencies CNN and Bloomberg, citing unnamed U.S. officials, reported that the White House had demanded that an American, Paul Whelan, who is serving time in Russia for espionage, also be exchanged with Griner, but the Kremlin did not agree to that option.
Behind Bars at all Costs
It must be said that in the story of Victor Bout the U.S. too clearly demonstrated a desire to put the businessman in jail at any cost, despite a whole list of legal inconsistencies. Starting with the fact that the lawyers trashed the charges of arms trafficking, so the U.S. Attorney's Office had to bring a second series of charges against Bout. So, the Russian businessman Victor Bout (born 1967) was detained in March 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand. Two months later, the United States accused Bout of illegal arms trafficking, conspiracy to assassinate U.S. citizens, and financing a terrorist organization. However, Bout's defense dropped all the charges in court. So, in August 2009, a Thai court refused to extradite Victor Bout to the United States. In February 2010, the United States had to bring a new series of charges against Bout - this time the businessman was accused of fraud, money laundering and selling arms to “hot spots” in violation of international sanctions.
This time, in August 2010, a Thai court ruled that Bout be extradited to the United States which was done in November of that year. During the hearings in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, the U.S. intelligence officers admitted that they played a “set-up” against Bout but the court did not take it into account. Also, it didn't take into account the position of the lawyers, who asked even if Bout had planned to sell arms to Colombian fighters, how does this offense violate the U.S. law? However, the court did take into account the testimony of his business partner Andrei (Andrew) Smulian, who testified that Bout allegedly really wanted to sell the weapons to the Colombian fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
In November 2011, a jury found Victor Bout guilty, and in April 2012, a federal court in New York sentenced him to 25 years in prison, despite the fact that the U.S. prosecutors demanded a life sentence and a $20 million fine for the Russian businessman. Since then, Victor Bout has been in solitary confinement in the U.S. prison Marion, the successor to Alcatraz, although in 2019 the media reported that Moscow had offered Washington to exchange him for 15 Americans serving sentences in Russia, but the White House refused, explicitly saying that these people were “of little interest.”
Somewhere out There is my Native Texas
Brittney Griner turned out to spark the interest of the White House. Right after the pardon, Joe Biden talked to her on the phone, and the White House press office reported about that. Brittney Griner was born on October 18, 1990 in Houston, Texas. The girl in high school showed herself as a promising basketball player, actively played for college teams, then moved on to professional sports.
Griner is gay, and in 2015 she even had a formal same-sex marriage with another American basketball player, which she demanded an annulment the same year, claiming it was “fraud and coercion.” Brittney Griner played for the UMMC Yekaterinburg club for the last 7 years (2015-2022) before being arrested in Russia for importing hashish into the country. Brittney Griner is indeed an outstanding athlete. She is twice world champion, and in 2016 and 2020 the U.S. team with Griner in its composition won the Olympic Games (Rio de Janeiro 2016, Tokyo 2020.)
Russian law enforcement officers detained Greiner at Sheremetyevo on February 17, 2022, and found e-cigarettes containing hashish oil, which is considered a narcotic substance, in her luggage. Considering how many Russians and foreigners are caught with heroin and cocaine, hash oil seems almost child's play. Especially since Brittney Greiner herself said in court that she used the medical marijuana cartridges in the U.S. as an anesthetic (according to U.S. law, it is allowed), and did not plan to bring them into Russia.
All the more surprising was that the punishment for such a minor misdemeanor was too harsh.
On August 4, 2022 the Khimki City Court found Greiner guilty and sentenced her to 9 years in a minimum security penal colony and a fine of 1 million rubles ($16,464.) Since October of this year Greiner was serving her sentence in colony No. 1 of the Federal Penitentiary Service in the settlement of Novoe Grishino in the Moscow Region.
All in all, she is a prominent American athlete, black and gay which is a 100 percent hit on the political agenda of the Democratic Party of the United States. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement, gays, lesbians and transgender people, as well as the entire NBA basketball league, weep and applaud Joe Biden as Brittney Griner's savior.
All to Abu Dhabi
The history of intelligence exchanges and political figures between the U.S. and Russia goes back more than a dozen years. “And for Louis Corvalan, they've exchanged a hooligan” was a popular joke from the 1970s about exchanging dissident Vladimir Bukarsky for Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan, who was languishing in the torture chambers of Augusto Pinochet's fascist regime.
The personality of Victor Bout in recent years has become surrounded by many legends and tall tales. There is even a legend that the Lord of War movie, starring Nicolas Cage, is based on the story of Victor Bout. However, the answer to the question of why the White House so insistently tried to imprison him and the Kremlin so stubbornly fought to have Bout released, is still waiting for its researcher. The most probable version is that Bout is either an active intelligence agent or has rendered invaluable services to Russian special services. Such active “pressure” on the part of the U.S. was caused by the struggle for redistribution of spheres of influence at the market of arms trade, and in Latin America and other regions of the world.
As for the exchange itself, several important conclusions arise.
First, Washington and Moscow have demonstrated their willingness to negotiate. Secondly, the U.S. and Russia brought such a negotiating platform as Abu Dhabi into the public eye although it may seem that Ankara is better for this, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, using the example of the so-called grain deal, demonstrated that he has ambitions to negotiate at the highest level.
And, finally, the most important thing is that the exchange of Bout for Griner is too small an event in terms of global developments and global trends. There is a possibility that the U.S. and Russia actually agreed in Abu Dhabi on more global issues, and the exchange of Bout for Griner is just a “trial balloon” to test on a minor issue, how much the players are willing to comply with the agreements reached. In that vein, one might recall how, for example, Reuters reported in November that Abu Dhabi was negotiating the export of Russian ammonia from Ukraine's Odessa.
The long-awaited exchange of Bout for Griner caused a veritable flurry of commentary from experts around the world.
“The prisoner exchange of Booth for Griner is not a deal, it is a surrender of America. It is not a display of American power. Terrorists and rogue nations are laughing,” John Bolton, former national security adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, wrote on Twitter.
“The media also referred to him as one of the unspoken middlemen for Russian military exports,” wrote Andrei Medvedev, a journalist and deputy speaker of the Moscow City Duma, on Telegram. “Bout himself denied reports of involvement in the arms trade and claimed that he was only involved in its transportation, not its sale.
“The exchange of Bout was more than beneficial: while in 2019 Russian authorities offered to give 15 Americans for his return, now the process took place according to the 1 to 1 formula. At the same time, it was not a valuable captured spy or a captive mercenary who went to the United States, but an ordinary basketball player detained back on February 17 for smuggling drugs at the Moscow airport. So we can thank the Foreign Ministry and other Russian agencies and personalities for their meticulous work to bring a Russian citizen home. Thanks to such moments the phrase 'we do not abandon our own people' acquires a real meaning.”
“Putin outplayed Biden,” Sergei Markov, a political analyst and the CEO of the Institute for Political Studies, wrote on Telegram. “Our spy Bout is at large. And the pro-Russian good girl athlete Greiner is at large. That's how we should do the exchanges from now on. We should hold our line tighter, tighter.
“Now there are hopes that Bout's exchange for Griner might be a step towards improving relations between Russia and the U.S. Let go of these hopes. This exchange shows, on the contrary, a tendency toward a worsening of relations between Russia and the United States in the near future. Why did the U.S. go for a clearly disadvantageous exchange? Because Biden knows that relations will worsen and is afraid that this will result in massacres of U.S. citizens in Russian prisons and that Griner's death will be pinned on him before the election.
“Surely Victor Bout is very valuable to the country. Perhaps someone will even explain why,” wrote Mikhail Vinogradov, political analyst and president of the St. Petersburg Policy Foundation, on Facebook*
“We will never know the status of a person, how valuable or equivalent the exchange is,” said Raphael Ordukhanyan, political scientist. “There will only be speculation. Obviously, Victor Bout was not an easy man, he bravely held on for 14 years. He was involved in some specific operations. We'll find out about that later. I don't know if he will perform, as our people who did some work for Russia did at one time.
I'm glad a Russian citizen is coming back. I'm glad that that troublemaker Brittney Griner is being released home, too, as she is not a danger to us. To my thinking, it will be well appreciated in the U.S. I'm glad that amidst the total doldrums, when there are no articulate and normal relations, professional people from the intelligence services are in contact. It's very important that professionals talk to professionals.”
* On March 21, 2022, the American multinational holding company Meta was declared extremist and banned in the Russian Federation. Meta Platforms Inc. is the parent company of the Facebook and Instagram social networks. Facebook and Instagram are also recognized as extremist organizations, and their activity is prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation.