Basketball star Brittney Griner lands in the US after 10 months in Russian detention following a prisoner swap with arms dealer Viktor Bout who flew home hours earlier in Moscow
Griner, who flew into San Antonio before dawn on Friday, was arrested on February 17 at a Moscow airport after vape cartridges containing cannabis oil were found in her luggage.
Griner, who had been detained in Russia since a week before the attack against Ukraine, travelled from a Russian penal colony to Moscow, then to Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates where the exchange took place, with the two walking past each other on the tarmac, US officials said. "So happy to have Brittney back on US soil. Welcome home BG!," US Special Presidential Envoy Roger Carstens, the chief US hostage coordinator, said in a post on Twitter.
Russia's state media trumpeted the swap as a win for Moscow, after the release of a man who the US Department of Justice has described as one of the world's most prolific arms dealers who had sold weapons across the globe to terrorists and America's enemies for decades. Bout always denied the charges.
"I wouldn't draw such a conclusion ... I'm pretty sure that neither our leadership, nor any other, thinks in such notions - whether you are weak or not," he said. "Bilateral relations continue to remain in a sorry state," TASS news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Friday.
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