One of the most high-profile modern stories of being in “American captivity” has ended

American basketball player Brittney Griner was exchanged at Abu Dhabi airport for Russian businessman Viktor Bout, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on December 8. Thus ended a long history of Moscow’s attempts to free a Russian from prison in the United States and return him to his homeland.

Bout was arrested in 2008 in Thailand at the request of Washington, he was charged with illegal arms trafficking and supporting terrorism. In the United States, it was believed that the businessman wanted to supply ground-to-air missiles to the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel group, which the United States recognized as terrorist. Bout spent 2.5 years in prison in Thailand, and then he was extradited to the United States, and in 2012 the court sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The Russian categorically did not admit his guilt.

A few months after the verdict, the Russian Ministry of Justice sent a request to the United States to transfer Bout to serve his sentence in his homeland, but was refused. The businessman’s defense tried unsuccessfully to challenge the verdict for several more years. In June 2022, the Russian lawyer, Steve Zissou, said that Bout’s health had “perceptibly deteriorated” due to a bacterial infection, and that the Bureau of Prisons did little to help.

The defender emphasized that the exchange of Bout is “a matter of life and death.” In total, he spent 13 years in prison. According to diplomats, Moscow has been negotiating with the United States for a long time on the release of a Russian citizen, but “Washington categorically refused to dialogue.” “Nevertheless, the Russian Federation continued to work actively to rescue our compatriot. As a result of the efforts made, we managed to reach an agreement with the American side,” the ministry said.

Bout managed to be exchanged for an American basketball player, two-time Olympic champion Greiner. She was detained in February 2022 at Sheremetyevo Airport after vape cartridges with hashish oil were found in her hand luggage. A criminal case was initiated under the article on drug smuggling, the Khimki court sentenced Greiner to nine years in a strict regime colony and a fine of 1 million rubles.

In court, an American woman said that she used marijuana in the United States with the permission of doctors instead of an analgesic. On November 4, she was transferred to a colony. At this time, negotiations were underway between Moscow and Washington, said US President Joe Biden. As a representative of the American administration told reporters on December 8, the final agreement on the exchange of Greiner for Bout was reached in the last 48 hours. “Brittney was sent from the colony to Moscow, and this morning she was sent to the UAE, where she was met by US representatives,” he said.

Interestingly, the issue of exchanging Greiner for Bout was finally resolved through the mediation of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The effort was led by UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the two countries’ Foreign Ministries said in a joint statement. Biden thanked the UAE for helping to return the basketball player, but did not mention Saudi Arabia. It was not until December 7 that a US court closed the case against Prince bin Salman for his involvement in the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, finding that the prince had “sovereign immunity.” Before the exchange procedure in Abu Dhabi, both Bout and Greiner were pardoned by the heads of the two states. Tatyana Moskalkova, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, called this exchange format successful. This gives both “the possibility of freedom of movement, not to mention the moral factor, when a person feels that the criminal prosecution against him is finally terminated,” she said. Moskalkova considers the exchange of Bout a “New Year’s gift.”

From the point of view of international law, the exchange is correct, says Sergei Glandin, a partner at the NSP law firm and an expert in international law. According to him, the severity and proportionality of the crimes in the exchange matters only in preliminary negotiations. At the same time, in the exchange, by agreement of the two countries, there can be not only one-to-one formulas, but also others. There is no question of pardon in the case of an exchange agreement; formally, these are convicted persons to serve their sentences in their homeland, says Glandin. The exchange does not signal a qualitative improvement in Russian-American relations, says Yury Rogulev, director of the Franklin Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of the United States. According to him, similar exchanges took place during the Cold War era, and they did not in themselves affect the logic of the confrontation between Moscow and Washington as a whole. The expert notes that it was fundamentally important for Biden to return the basketball player home, this was one of his political promises. At the same time, many years of tough bargaining was going on around Bout with Moscow, Rogulev recalls.

The prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States did not include American Paul Whelan convicted in Moscow for espionage. The White House expects that the channel of negotiations with the Russian Federation will remain open upon his return. The representative of the American administration stressed that the US considers the exchange of Whelan “an urgent matter”, however, the issue has not yet been resolved.

Political analyst Yevgeny Minchenko, in turn, noted that Bout’s return to his homeland (the exchange took place in a 1:1 format) is “a signal that Russian citizens are being pulled out”: “The story of the exchange is very mythologized, but the fact that it was possible to exchange a Russian citizen, perceived positively.