Reports are circulating that the United States is in negotiations with Russia to stock exchange two Americans are being held in Russian prisons for a notorious arms dealer serving time in America. The deal is completely skewed: the two Americans – basketball star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, a director of a security firm – are not criminals and certainly not remotely similar to Victor Bouta notorious supplier of weapons to terrorists, once known as the ‘merchant of death’.
But if that’s the way to get American citizens out of a Russian prison, then do it. The only caveat, an urgent one, would be to include in the deal Marc Fogel, an American teacher sentenced to an absurd 14 years in prison for bringing marijuana into Russia. His offenses are: comparable to whoever Mrs. Griner, 31, is accused of. She was arrested in February with two hash oil cartridges in her luggage; Mr Fogel, 61, was carrying 14 vaping cartridges of marijuana and some cannabis buds.
Both say they need cannabis to deal with injuries and pain. But for reasons the State Department has not clarified, the US government has designated Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan as “wrongly detained” but not mister Fogel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken named this third American prisoner during a recently press conference, in which he said he intended to address the issue of an exchange for Ms Griner and Mr Whelan with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia.
Mr. Fogel was a popular teacher at the Anglo-American School in Moscow (not an employee of the US embassy, according to The Washington Post, as some reports described him) who had had back and shoulder surgeries and a knee replacement and used medical marijuana for pain. Mrs. Griner, a WNBA star, testified that she used marijuana on the advice of a doctor.
Mrs. Griner and Mr. Fogel were arrested on charges of possession of the marijuana found in their luggage upon arrival at the Moscow airport, and both pleaded guilty. Mr Whelan, a former Marine who worked as director of global security and investigations for BorgWarner and had visited Russia several times, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years for espionage. He denies the accusation.
However, it is not about whether the three American prisoners are guilty. Nor should efforts to free Americans held in repressive countries be based on their celebrity or the publicity generated by their arrests. The Russian justice system — such as that in China and Iran, other countries with which the United States has organized prisoner swaps — is notoriously political, and any American imprisoned in those countries, guilty or not, is likely to be held for propaganda purposes or as hostages to exchange. for imprisoned Russians.
Such swaps are hardly new, so precedent is not an issue. In a celebrated swap 60 years agoRudolf Abel, a Soviet spy, was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot of a downed U-2 spy plane; one of the more famous that followed was the exchange of the Jewish dissident Nathan Sharansky for a Czech caught spying for the Soviet Union.
In September 1986, when I was a correspondent in the Soviet Union, a friend and colleague, Nicholas Daniloff, who was a correspondent for US News and World Report, was framed by a false dissident and arrested on charges of espionage. It is no coincidence that a Soviet employee of the Soviet mission to the United Nations was arrested three times days earlier on espionage costs. The two were quickly swapped, and at a press conference on his release, Mr. Daniloff said the KGB was always ready to grab someone for such an exchange. “They could have chosen Serge Schmemann,” he said saidand in fact the decoy dissident had also tried to contact me.
Most recent, Trevor Reeda former US Marine detained in Russia for two years on what his family described as trumped-up assault charges was exchanged in April for a Russian pilot convicted of drug trafficking.
The swaps are rarely equal. Mr. Bout, the Russian named as the prize for the liberation of the Americans, was notorious as an arms dealer in the chaotic years after the collapse of the Soviet Union for, according to US prosecutors, armed groups and terrorists. He was arrested in Thailand in 2008 and extradited to the United States a few years later, including for supplying weapons to Colombian rebels for use against American civilians and officers, and sentenced to 25 years in prisonwhom he served in Illinois.
It would be painful for prosecutors and those who suffered from the violence he took advantage of to release him in exchange for people who should not have been jailed at all. If Mr. Fogel serves his full sentence in Russia, he may well die in prison.
It may be that by agreeing to swap prisoners with autocrats, the United States is encouraging them to take more hostages. But it is more important for American citizens to know that if they are locked up in a country with a dubious legal system, the US government will do everything it can to get them back. “I am a US citizen” should bear the full faith and promise of the US government wherever those words are spoken in the world. And that is as true of Mr. Fogel as it is of Mrs. Griner or Mr. Whelan.