Brittney Griner arrived in Russia in February to play basketball, one of the sport’s biggest stars. She arrived in a courtroom outside Moscow on Friday as something completely different – a potential bargaining chip in Russia’s tense battle with the West over the war in Ukraine, described by supporters as a hostage of the Kremlin.
After more than four months in a Russian prison and no Russian speaking, Ms. Griner, 31, was on trial, accused of carrying his steam cartridges with traces – 0.7 grams, the prosecutor – of marijuana oil into the country. In a legal system where defendants rarely convict anything but guilty, she faces up to 10 years in a penal colony if convicted.
Me. Griner’s arrest on February 17 – a week before the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – plunged her into the swamp of geopolitics as President Vladimir V. Putin faced a determined Western effort to help Ukraine fight back. She was presented in Russian state media as an asset that could be exchanged for a Russian arms dealer sitting in a US prison.
Although Russia’s drug laws can impose severe penalties, a foreigner caught with a small amount will usually not be sentenced to more than a month in prison, a fine and deportation, but Mr. Putin’s government has a long history of detention for international leverage, sometimes to obtain the release of a Russian detained abroad.
With little information to go on, Ms. Griner’s supporters are concerned about her physical and emotional health and how she is being treated – an openly gay, black American in a culturally conservative country who has adopted anti-gay laws, has few black people and sees. the United States as its nemesis. They cite her isolation and the near certainty that she is being held in linguistic conditions not designed to accommodate her 6-foot-9 frame.
“She tells me she’s OK,” her wife, Cherelle, who could only communicate with her through letters, said in a recent radio interview with Rev. Al Sharpton said. Cherelle Griner said Brittney Griner promised, “I will not let them break me.”
But Brittney Griner is struggling, her wife said. “She’s a human, she’s scared there, she’s alone there,” Cherelle Griner said. “It’s not just that she can not talk to her loved ones. She can not speak to anyone because she does not speak the language. It is inhuman on all levels. “
Mrs. Griner cut an unpleasant figure in a court in Khimki, outside Moscow, on Friday, as always stands out above everyone else while being ushered in, handcuffed her long, tattooed arms and handcuffed to the arm of a guard. For the first day of her trial, she wore a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and athletic shoes without laces.
She was sitting in the accused’s cage with a bottle of water and a bag of cookies, and told a reporter that detention was difficult due to the language barrier and a lack of exercise, Reuters reported. The session, which was held in Russia with a few journalists and three U.S. embassy officials present, was quickly added after some expected witnesses did not show up. The trial is set to resume next Thursday.
A prosecutor told the court that Ms. Griner was “aware enough” that the transportation of drugs to Russia was banned, according to the state-run Russian news agency Tass. Me. Griner said she understands the charges, but will later comment on her response, the agency said.
Cherelle Griner and others questioned whether the Biden administration was doing enough to secure Brittney Griner’s release, a view that the State Department on Friday seemed determined to eliminate. Elizabeth Rood, the prosecutor at the US embassy in Moscow, attended the trial and then spoke to reporters.
“I did have the opportunity to speak to Ms. Griner in the courtroom,” she said. Red said. “She is doing as well as can be expected in these difficult circumstances and asked me to convey that she is in good spirits and keeps her faith.”
“The Russian Federation has detained Ms. Griner illegally,” she said, adding, “the U.S. government at the very highest levels is working very hard to bring Ms. Griner as well as all illegally detained U.S. citizens home safely.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken tweeted“We – and I personally – have no higher priority than bringing her and other illegally detained Americans” home.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov denied at a news conference Friday that the case was politically motivated, or that the government was even involved. “Only the court can give a verdict,” he said.
But reports in Russian state media indicate that Moscow me. Griner is seen as a valuable asset in his confrontation with the United States, leading Western efforts to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion. Tass reported in May that officials were in talks with me. Griner exchanges for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer who is serving a 25-year sentence in a U.S. federal prison for conspiring to sell weapons to people who said they planned to kill Americans.
In April, the Biden administration secured the release of Trevor R. Reed, a former U.S. Marine who was detained in Russia for two years on what his family said were false charges of assault, in exchange for a Russian pilot. who was sentenced to a long prison term. the United States on charges of cocaine trafficking.
U.S. officials have no talks on the exchange of Ms. Griner does not confirm. The Kremlin has been pushing for the release of Mr. Bolt, but U.S. officials are reluctant to take any steps that could be seen as a threat to the safety of Americans.
Photos and videos gave brief public looks of me. Griner arriving in court and leaving. Fans are examining the images, which some have described as heartbreaking, for clues about her well-being in the expressions behind her round glasses.
Legal experts say me. Griner’s trial would almost certainly end in a conviction despite screams in the United States for her release. Her lawyer, Aleksandr Boykov, said this week that he expected the trial to last up to two months.
She was detained in Correctional Colony No. 1, or IK-1, in the village of Novoye Grishino, a 50-mile drive from Central Moscow – a former orphanage that was converted a decade ago to detain women serving prison sentences or awaiting trial. Video footage of the jail available online shows high, gray walls, old jail bars and a rusty monument to Lenin in the courtyard.
The Russian authorities have not disclosed where Ms. Griner is not, but The New York Times was able to identify the prison from a photo posted online by a visitor, and the location was confirmed by a person familiar with the matter.
What to know about Brittney Griner’s detention in Russia
For me. Griner looks about the same every day, said Yekaterina Kalugina, a journalist and member of a public prison monitoring group that Ms. Griner visited the jail, he said. (She said Ms Griner’s mattress was too small for someone her size.)
The prisoners wake up, eat breakfast in their cell – usually some basic food – and then go for a walk in the prison’s courtyard, which is covered by a net. The rest of the day was filled with reading books – me. Griner, for example, read Dostoyevsky in translation – and watching television, even though all the channels are in Russian, Ms. Kalugina said.
The cell has a separate private laundry room, she said, something of a novelty for Russian prisons. They may only shower twice a week.
Thousands of Russian women went through it, along with at least one other well-known foreigner: Naama Issachar, an Israeli-American who was arrested in April 2019 when Russian police said they weighed 9.5 grams – one third of an ounce – of found. marijuana in her luggage while joining a Moscow airport.
Ms Issachar was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison on charges of drug possession and smuggling, and Israeli officials and her family said the Kremlin linked her fate to that of a Russian detained in Israel. No exchange was made – Israel extradited the Russian detainee to the United States to face computer crime charges – but Mr. Putin, who has cultivated ties with Israel, called me. Issachar pardoned 10 months after she was arrested.
In a telephone interview from Israel, her mother, Yaffa Issachar, said that her daughter cried when she heard from me. Heard Griner’s case and said to her, “I know what she’s going through now.”
The mother said that Naama Issachar was treated relatively well by her cellmates, but that she feared that Ms. Griner, as a gay woman, can be treated worse because of Russia’s conservative attitudes and discriminatory laws on homosexuality.
Me. Ishaffar suggested that me. Griner’s family gets a priest who can visit her. “There’s someone watching them,” she said, “but at least there’s someone she can talk to.”
Me. Griner, who plays center for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, is a seven-time All-Star league, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first openly gay athlete signed by Nike to an endorsement contract.
But female basketball players are paid a fraction of what their male counterparts make in the United States, so me. Griner, like many others, also played in overseas leagues during the WNBA where the contracts are much more lucrative. She has played two seasons in China, and since 2014 she has been playing in Russia, for UMMC Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
On February 17, she landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, where her suitcases were searched. She never reached the Urals.
Reporting contributed by Michael Crowley, Elizabeth Kershner, jonathan abrams and Tania Ganguli.