The US has NOT received a ‘substantial offer’ for Brittney Griner, says State Department

While Russia is outwardly considering a prisoner exchange to return American basketball star Brittney Griner to the United States, the State Department is tempering expectations by saying they have not yet received a “substantial offer.”

US officials hoped Russia would be more inclined to enter prisoner swap talks after the Nov. 8 midterms, but now say optimism was misplaced.

“We are not going to comment on the details of proposals, except to say that we have made a substantial offer that the Russian Federation has consistently failed to negotiate in good faith,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“The U.S. government has continued to follow up on that offer and is proposing alternative possible ways to proceed with the Russian government,” the statement continued. “The failure of the Russian government to seriously negotiate these issues through the incumbent broadcaster, or any other broadcaster for that matter, contradicts its public statements.”

Russia said on Friday it hoped to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the United States to return convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Trader of Death,” in an exchange likely to involve American basketball player Brittney Griner.

Amid Europe’s deadliest war since World War II, Russia and the United States are exploring a deal that would allow captured Americans, including Griner, to return to the United States in exchange for Bout.

“I want to hope that the prospect not only remains, but also strengthened, and that the moment will come when we will get a concrete agreement,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax.

“The Americans show some outside activity, we work professionally through a special channel designed for this,” Ryabkov said. ‘Viktor Bout is one of the discussion partners and we certainly count on a positive result.’

Griner has been transferred to a penal colony in the Mordovia region, southeast of Moscow, her lawyers said Thursday.

At her trial, Griner – who played off-season basketball for a Russian team in the US – said she had used cannabis to relieve sports injuries, but had no intention of breaking the law. She told the court she had made an honest mistake in putting the cartridges in her luggage.

Griner was sentenced in August following her arrest in February at a Moscow airport, when Russian authorities said she was caught entering the country with vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. She was held in a detention center near Moscow until November 4, when she was transferred to a secret prison.

It has been two weeks since any information about her whereabouts has surfaced.

For the two former Cold War enemies, now grappling with the most serious confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the exchange would mark one of the more extraordinary prisoner swaps in their history.

Ryabkov’s obviously cheerful remarks, the State Department man for America and arms control, stand in stark contrast to earlier statements from Moscow, which have warned Washington not to engage in megaphone diplomacy over the prisoner swap.

The potential swap includes Griner, who is serving nine years behind bars in Russia after being convicted on drug charges, and Paul Whelan, who is serving a 16-year sentence in Russia after being convicted of espionage charges he denies.

Russia and the United States have discussed swapping Griner and Whelan, a former US Marine, for Bout, but no deal has materialized amid heightened tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dubbed “the merchant of death” and “the sanctions breaker” for his ability to evade arms embargoes, Bout was one of the world’s most wanted men on multiple charges related to arms trafficking prior to his 2008 arrest.

For nearly two decades, Bout was one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups and murderous warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.

But in 2008, Bolt was caught up in an extensive American sting.

Bout was caught on camera agreeing to sell US undercover agents posing as representatives of Colombia’s leftist FARC guerrillas 100 surface-to-air missiles, which they would use to kill US troops. Soon after, he was arrested by Thai police.

Bout was tried on charges related to the FARC, which he denied, and was sentenced in 2012 by a US judge in New York to 25 years in prison, the minimum possible sentence.

Since then, the Russian state has been eager to get him back.

Established for the Soviet gulag system in 1931, Yavas remains one of the largest hubs in Russia’s network of prisons and penal colonies. It currently has three institutions including a women’s colony, a men’s colony and a mixed colony.

A notorious women’s center in Mordovia, IK-14 is just seven minutes from Yavas.

The infamous penal colony is known as a rat-infested sweatshop for prisoners, some of whom spent hours losing fingers to their sewing machines. To deal with the rat population, the guards enlisted stray cats, which were later tossed into ovens to keep their numbers down, according to a 2019 Radio Free Europe report.

Veronika Krass, a former IK-14 prisoner, told Radio Free Europe that a sign reading ‘welcome to hell’ greets new prisoners at the penal colony.

Notable political prisoners have served time at IK-14, including Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a founding member of the punk group Pussy Riot and a vocal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“As the prisoners say, ‘If you haven’t spent time in Mordovia, you haven’t spent time,'” Tolokonnikova wrote in a letter published in 2013.

She described IK-14 as “slavery-like conditions,” where she worked “16 to 17 hours a day” in a sewing workshop while getting “four hours of sleep a night.”