Joe Biden will not “apologize,” said his spokeswoman: The prisoner exchange between a basketball star, Brittney Griner, and a high-flying Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, was hotly debated in the United States on Thursday.
• Also read: Basketball player Brittney Griner, who was released from prison, was trafficked for the notorious Russian arms dealer
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre was met with questions during her daily briefing to find out whether the US president had made what the Republican opposition claimed was a “bad deal”.
The 80-year-old Democrat “didn’t take his decision lightly,” she assured, and remains “vigilant” following the release of the man nicknamed the “merchant of death.”
Acknowledging that the prisoner swap could “immediately feel unfair or arbitrary,” she said, “The President (Biden) felt a moral obligation. (…) It was either Brittney or nobody. And we won’t apologize for that.”
“I honestly think Viktor Bout has served 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 was sentenced to 25 years in US prison, of which he is thought to have served about half.
” Mute “
“He wasn’t a terrorist himself. He was an arms dealer. Arms dealers are everywhere, including the United States and France,” she added.
This is not the opinion of many Republican Party tenors, starting with ex-President Donald Trump, who denounced a “one-way market”, “stupid” and “embarrassing” on his network Truth Social. »
Others, like Republican MP Nicole Malliotakis, particularly emphasize that the transaction does not settle the fate of another American imprisoned in Russia for four years, ex-soldier Paul Whelan: “An American + Marine + is left behind in another bad deal Biden,” she denounced.
US diplomat chief Antony Blinken warned him that Russia wanted to treat the two cases differently because of “false allegations of espionage” against 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 actually a spy, then you would have had a spy against an arms dealer, that seems a bit more relevant,” she says.
“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, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020, will now be difficult to settle: his “best chance” of going to Russia “should be part.” of exchanges with Brittney Griner”, whose case triggered a strong mobilization, especially in the world of women’s basketball.
The athlete was arrested in Moscow in February 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 position of strength” over a Joe Biden who made a very personal and very media-friendly effort to get Brittney Griner released.
The United States, like other democracies, sometimes resorts to prisoner exchanges that are perceived as imbalanced but whose governments believe they meet the high expectations of public opinion.
In 2011, Israel released more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for a single soldier, Gilad Shalit.
From Brittney Griner’s point of view, the strongest criticism, at least in the first few hours after the announcement, was mainly focused on the conservative camp.
Does it show public opinion? An American football player, Micah Parsons, has apologized on Twitter for a message in which he was outraged that the United States was “abandoning a Marine.”
Faced with an onslaught of criticism, he went back to his comments and said he was “extremely happy” at the 32-year-old double Olympic gold medalist’s release.