September 21, 2022
Page 5
s ports
Griner Release Negotiations Strained
Whelan, Griner
families to meet
President Biden
(AP) -President Joe Biden
plans to meet at the White House
with family members of WNBA
star Brittney Griner and Michigan
corporate security executive Paul
Whelan, both of whom remain
jailed in Russia, the White House
announced Thursday.
“He wanted to let them know
that they remain front of mind and
that his team is working on this ev-
ery day, on making sure that Brit-
tney and Paul return home safely,”
White House press secretary Kar-
ine Jean-Pierre said at Thursday’s
press briefing at the White House.
The separate meetings are to
be the first in-person encounter
between Biden and the families
and are taking place amid sus-
tained but so far unsuccessful
efforts by the administration to
secure the Americans’ release.
The administration said in July
that it had made a “substantial
proposal” to get them home,
but despite plans for the White
House meetings, there is no sign
a breakthrough is imminent.
“While I would love to say that
the purpose of this meeting is to
inform the families that the Rus-
sians have accepted our offer and
we are bringing their loved ones
home — that is not what we’re
seeing in these negotiations at this
time,” Jean-Pierre said.
She added: “The Russians
should accept our offer. The
Russians should accept our
offer today.”
Griner has been held in Russia
since February on drug-related
charges. She was sentenced last
month to nine years in prison af-
WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted from a court room after a
hearing(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
ter pleading guilty and has ap-
pealed the punishment. Whelan
is serving a 16-year sentence on
espionage-related charges that he
and his family say are false. The
U.S. government regards both as
wrongfully detained, placing their
cases with the office of its top hos-
tage negotiator.
Secretary of State Antony
Blinken took the unusual step of
announcing two months ago that
the administration had made a
substantial proposal to Russia.
Since then, U.S officials have con-
tinued to press that offer in hopes
of getting serious negotiations
underway, and have been follow-
ing up through the same channel
that produced an April prisoner
swap that brought Marine veteran
Trevor Reed home from Russia,
said a senior administration offi-
cial who spoke to The Associated
Press on condition of anonymity
in advance of Thursday’s formal
announcement.
The negotiations, already
strained because of tense rela-
tions between Washington and
Moscow over Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine, have also been com-
plicated by Russia’s apparent
resistance to the proposal the
Americans put on the table.
The Russians, who have indi-
cated that they are open to nego-
tiations but have chided the Amer-
icans to conduct them in private,
have come back with suggestions
that are not within the administra-
tion’s ability to deliver, said the
administration official, declining
to elaborate.
The administration has not
provided specifics about its pro-
posal, but a person familiar with
the matter previously confirmed it
had offered to release Viktor Bout,
a convicted Russian arms deal-
er who is imprisoned in the U.S.
and who has long been sought by
Moscow. It is also possible that, in
the interests of symmetry, Russia
might insist on having two of its
citizens released from prison.
Biden spoke by phone in July
with Griner’s wife, Cherelle, and
with Whelan’s sister, Elizabeth,
but both families have also re-
quested in-person meetings. On
Friday, Biden plans to speak at
the White House with Cherelle
Griner and with the player’s
agent in one meeting and with
Elizabeth Whelan in the other,
according to the official.
The meetings are being done
separately so as to ensure that
each family has private time with
the president. But the fact that
they are happening on the same
day shows the extent to which
the two cases have become inter-
twined since the only deal that is
presumably palatable to the U.S.
is one that gets both Americans
— a famous WNBA player and a
Michigan man who until recently
was little known to the public —
home together at the same time,
In the past several months, rep-
resentatives of both families have
expressed frustration over what
they perceived as a lack of aggres-
sive action and coordination from
the administration.
Cherelle Griner, for instance,
told The Associated Press in
an interview in June that she
was dismayed after the failure
of a phone call from her wife
that was supposed to have been
patched through by the Ameri-
can Embassy in Moscow left the
couple unable to connect on their
fourth anniversary.
Whelan’s
relatives
have
sought to keep attention on his
case, anxious that it has been
overshadowed in the public eye
by the focus on the far more
prominent Griner — a two-time
Olympic gold medalist and sev-
en-time WNBA all-star. They
also conveyed disappointment
when Whelan, despite having
been held in Russia since De-
cember 2018, was not included
in a prisoner swap last April that
brought home Reed.
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