Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is open to speaking with U.S. representatives about a prisoner swap involving two Americans the Biden administration considers to be wrongfully detained by Russia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday that the U.S. had made a “significant proposal” to the Russians and that their offer was still on the table. The expectations are that any deal would likely be WNBA superstar Brittney Griner and retired Marine Paul Whelan for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
US MAKES ‘SIGNIFICANT PROPOSAL’ TO RUSSIA FOR GRINER AND WHELAN’S RELEASE
Lavrov, during a trip to Uzbekistan on Friday, said that his ministry had received a U.S. request for a call following Blinken’s comments. The Russian official said the two sides are still working to schedule the call, though he said he’d be ready once he got back to Russia.
“I will listen to what he has to say,” Lavrov said, according to the Associated Press, while a day earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the U.S.’s unusual maneuver to tell the public about the offer before it was accepted.
Blinken’s comments came as a surprise considering the department’s standard operating procedure is to keep these types of negotiations away from the public until the deal is in progress, such as how both sides agreed to swap Trevor Reed for Russian drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko.
“We know that such issues are discussed without any such release of information,” Peskov told reporters during a conference call. “Normally, the public learns about it when the agreements are already implemented.”
Griner’s trial is ongoing in Russia, and she’s facing a 10-year prison sentence in a judicial system that overwhelmingly results in guilty verdicts for drug possession. She has been detained since mid-February when she was arrested at a Moscow airport for bringing vape cartridges into the country, which she said had been both prescribed for her and an accident that she brought them with her.
She pleaded guilty and, during her testimony, alleged that she wasn’t informed of her rights at the time she was arrested and that she was forced to sign documents she didn’t understand.
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Whelan was arrested in late 2018 and was later convicted of espionage, charges he denies. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020.
Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” for his willingness to sell arms to alleged human rights abusers in a multitude of African nations, has been in a U.S. prison since 2012. His lawyer declined to comment on Blinken’s comments but previously told the Washington Examiner that he believed the Kremlin would do a Griner and Whelan swap for Bout.
