BRittney Griner has been held in Moscow since February 17, when it was discovered at the airport that she had cannabis oil in her luggage when she entered the country. Since then, the WNBA star has been almost incommunicado and staging something akin to a diplomatic crisis around the same time Russia invades Ukraine.
His coach at the Phoenix Mercury, Vanessa Nygaard, has referred to Griner and has raised a hypothesis. “If I were LeBron James, I’d be home, right? It’s a statement about the worth of a woman. It’s a statement about the worth of a black person. It’s a statement about the worth of a gay person. All of those things. And we know. And so, that’s what hurts a little more,” he said of what he considers double standards.
In the last few days there have been some changes in Griner’s situation. The pvot was even able to send a letter to Joe Biden, president of the United States, asking him to get involved in his case. Nygaard admitted that reading it made him cry. “It’s great that he was able to send us that message. Hopefully some people are paying attention to him,” says the coach.
The preventive prison for Griner has already been extended three times and, with the charges he faces, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. However, the deputy director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexi Zitsev, assured this Wednesday that she will be able to appeal her sentence or even request a pardon after the trial is over. “No one will deprive you of that possibility,” she said. Another thing is that he is productive. In addition, Zitsev considers that “Any attempt to present this case as an illegal detention does not bear any criticism,” he added.
It recently became known that Russia and the United States are negotiating the exchange of Griner for a Russian arms dealer who is serving a sentence in a US prison. The two countries have recently made an exchange between the American student Trevor Reed, sentenced to nine years in prison for resisting arrest, for the Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, sentenced in the United States to 20 years for drug smuggling.