Russia-US prisoner swap: Brittney Griner freed
The US professional basketball player Brittney Griner has been released from a penal colony and is heading back to the US. She was arrested in Russia on 17 February after a small amount of cannabis oil was found in her luggage, and sentenced to nine years in prison in August. The US secured her release by exchanging her for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in Illinois.
Russia's idol
La Stampa notes:
“There is something symbolic about a former Red Army lieutenant turned international arms dealer being exchanged for an African-American lesbian basketball champion. Propaganda will not miss the opportunity to portray the top American athlete as a symbol of the 'corrupted' West - while the homeland embraces a real man, a soldier, a patriot who kept a portrait of Vladimir Putin in his cell and sold weapons to terrorists and guerrillas. ... Russia's role models today are people like Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, or the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, whose murdered critics could fill an entire cemetery by now.”
Putin being encouraged to take hostages
Russian opposition politician and Navalny supporter Leonid Volkov fears unpleasant side effects on Facebook:
“The American perspective is clear: it wants to protect its own citizens at all costs. That deserves respect. But if you look at the big picture through the lens of the rest of the world, it looks like this: Putin is being encouraged to create an 'exchange pool', in other words, to simply pick off random people. It already wasn't safe for foreigners in Russia, but now it's getting really scary: terrorist Putin has been given a clear signal that he can demand any price for hostages.”