Brittney Griner, a 6-foot-9 basketball center who is arguably the greatest tall player in WNBA history, saw her life changed forever when she was arrested in February at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. Russian authorities claimed they discovered that Griner was transporting two vape cartridges containing a total of 0.702 grams of hash oil. This offense might not unduly trouble Americans who have witnessed the recent liberalization of state laws regarding cannabis possession, but it is punishable by up to a decade in a penal colony in a country that imprisons more drug offenders per capita than any other European country.
Since her arrest, Griner has remained behind bars, recently attracting renewed attention after she pleaded guilty in advance of her trial, admitting wrongdoing, and penned a letter to President Joe Biden in which she urged him not to forget about her. Her situation has become a cause celebre as the war in Ukraine intensifies, with various commentators weighing in to argue that the fact that she is a black lesbian has made her return a much lower priority for the United States. Vanessa Nygaard, the head coach of the Phoenix Mercury team for which Griner plays, said earlier this month that “if it was LeBron, he’d be home.”
Such claims are curious, given the time and energy invested in bringing an end to Griner’s ordeal. Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who played a key role in securing the release of former Marine Trevor Reed from Russian detention in April, will soon be traveling to Russia to try to do the same for both Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine sentenced in June 2020 to 16 years in prison after being found guilty of espionage charges. The White House has made multiple statements about the importance of Griner’s release. Forgotten amid all this noise was the fact that in March, Griner’s wife, Cherelle, requested privacy so she could focus her attention on Brittney’s return rather than dealing with the media. Any possible support for claims such as the one made by Nygaard is belied by the ground truth of the matter.
This is indeed an unfortunate reality, a “tragedy of the uncommons” in which an uncommonly talented performer who earned slightly over $220,000 a year for her basketball services in the U.S. assumed the risk inherent in traveling to a country like Russia to earn more than $1 million a year playing for the Russian Premier League’s UMMC Ekaterinburg, a team owned by Russian mining billionaire Andrei Kozitsyn. The economics of big-time Russian sports, such as the rule of law in the country, remain a mystery to most outside observers, though the deep pockets of oligarchs like Kozitsyn factor heavily into both the athletic and legal contexts.
When I interviewed veteran MMA fighter Tony Johnson, who, like Griner, is black, in early 2021, I quizzed him about his earnings in Absolute Championship Akhmat — a fight promotion owned by Chechen Republic leader Ramzan Kadyrov that was sanctioned in late 2020 by the Treasury Department. Johnson said the money was considerably more than he could earn domestically but that his career there wasn’t something that could be maintained over the long haul, given that American fighters now faced fines or prison sentences back in the U.S. if they accepted ACA bookings. In spite of this knowledge, Johnson still fights in the ACA, dropping his ACA heavyweight title to Salimgerey Rasulov in Grozny, Russia, in March 2022 — this at a time when many U.S. businesses have discontinued operations in Russia and many established Russian cultural products, such as the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, have fallen into a degree of Russophobic disfavor here at home.
Most highly skilled foreign athletes working in Russia likely recognize that the financial rewards from these arrangements carry a good deal of downside risk. They perform at their own peril, as Johnson continues to do. My uncle, an official with the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service, certainly understood this risk when he accepted an assignment to Russia that ended with his own death in 2015 from a heart attack that occurred while lifting weights in the U.S. Embassy. When I traveled to Moscow to help resolve his affairs, I encountered a tense situation from the U.S. and Russian governments regarding his autopsy. Were an autopsy to have been done, Russian authorities would have to perform it. His sons elected instead to have the body returned home immediately, without any investigation into the cause of death.
This was an unpleasant situation even for the family of a person who possessed a degree of diplomatic protection. Griner, who has had past brushes with U.S. law enforcement related to domestic violence charges stemming from a fight with her then-wife Glory Johnson in 2015, surely ought to have grasped the dangers posed by a drastically different country with different laws and cultural norms. My own cousin, who is black, was frequently pulled out of line when traveling through Moscow Domodedovo Airport or Sheremetyevo International Airport and pinched by bribe-seeking police when smoking “near” the Moscow Metro, technically a fineable offense, albeit one that appeared to be used primarily to harass and extort minorities and other undesirables.
Griner wasn’t transporting a Midnight Express-level of hashish out of Russia. Billy Hayes, the unfortunate author of that book, was carrying 2 kilograms of hashish bricks when arrested by the Turkish police. But the risk had to register somewhere in her mind. Although Russia continues to cope with an epidemic of “krokodil,” the street name for the drug desomorphine, which can cause sores and necrosis to proliferate around injection sites, anti-drug messaging in its big cities is ubiquitous, admittedly in Cyrillic script but accompanied by images that follow international conventions in sign illustration. My own commutes through Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo have been tense affairs, perhaps because the 1970s-era flavor of these Brutalist buildings and the impassive bureaucrats and clerks staffing them underscore the reality that I’m not traveling with the protections of the U.S. Constitution. I could, at any moment, run afoul of some foreign law, thus beginning my own Kafkaesque legal ordeal in a country far from my own.
Given Griner’s guilty plea, it now seems fruitless to speculate about whether the drugs were planted on her person as a means of facilitating exactly this sort of incident. Based on what I witnessed in Russia in 2015, this strikes me as possible. Yet it seems probably far less likely than Griner carelessly acquiring and then packing an illegal substance she used to soothe her nerves. Hers is a situation that on its surface seems to stand in for so many partisan talking points about race, gender, sexuality, and foreign policy, yet in its essence is nothing more than a case of being in the wrong place at the worst possible time.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
