The prisoner exchange of WNBA basketball player Brittney Griner and convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout has been caught on video and was released by Russia’s state media outlet TASS on Thursday.
In the video, Griner can be seen on the tarmac of an airport wearing a red jacket as she walked next to unidentified individuals toward Bout. The clip is then cut to the part where the 32-year-old American is guided away by an individual.
Shortly after, Bout is seen hugging and shaking hands with one man before greeting another individual as he walks away from Griner with two unidentified persons.
After the swap, Bout was immediately allowed to contact his mother, telling her by phone that he is fine and the exchange went well, TASS reported. The Russian ministry said that the handoff took place in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates capital.
Обнародованы видеокадры обмена россиянина Виктора Бута на американку Бриттни Грайнер:https://t.co/hs1cFtHbOs
Видео: ТАСС pic.twitter.com/UZ209BYPRX
— ТАСС (@tass_agency) December 8, 2022
Griner, who plays for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury team, was arrested in mid-February at Moscow’s airport after customs officials found vaping cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage, an illegal substance in Russia.
The two-time Olympic medalist was later sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony for possessing and smuggling drugs.
Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death,” was working to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons, including 800 surface-to-air missiles and 30,000 AK-47s, to Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a designated foreign terrorist group based in Colombia, to kill Americans there, according to prosecutors at his 2011 trial.
“As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” Preet Bharara, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement at the time. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans. With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars.”
At a White House news conference on Dec. 8, President Joe Biden said it “took painstaking and intense negotiations” to secure Griner’s release as he thanked “all the hardworking public servants across [his] administration who worked” on the case and pushed tirelessly for her release.
The exchange was a rare instance of cooperation between the United States and Russia since the war in Ukraine started in February.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press conference on Dec. 8 that the United States is “grateful” to the United Arab Emirates for “facilitating the use of their territory.”
“We are also grateful to other countries, including Saudi Arabia, that released [sic] the issue of our wrongfully detained Americans with Russian government—that raised that issue,” she said, noting that only the United States and Russia negotiated this deal and there was “no mediation involved.”
Epoch Times reporter Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
