Does the conviction of Brittney Griner augur a new exchange of prisoners between Russia and the United States? The American basketball player was sentenced, Thursday, August 4, to 9 years in prison for drug trafficking, after her arrest in February in possession of a cannabis-based electronic cigarette liquid. A decision “unacceptable” for Joe Biden.
A new illustration of “the Russian government’s use of illegitimate detentions to advance its interests by using individuals as political pawns”, for its head of diplomacy, Antony Blinken. Even before the conviction of his national, double Olympic champion, the latter mentioned to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, the possibility of an exchange of prisoners. An offer “consequent” et “serious” pour Washington.
An exchange for Viktor Bout, the “merchant of death”?
On one side: Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, sentenced to 16 years in prison in Russia for ” spying “. On the other: Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer, nicknamed the “merchant of death”. Arrested in Thailand in 2008, he is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
The last operation of this type dates back to April 27. Two months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and renewed tensions between the United States and Russia, two men passed each other on a Turkish tarmac. The American Trevor Reed, imprisoned for assaulting two police officers in Moscow while intoxicated – something he has always denied. The Russian Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot arrested by the American secret services in 2010 in Liberia and imprisoned for drug trafficking.
“Same springs as during the Cold War”
“Staging and dramatization, claimed objective of saving compatriots, means of demining the risk of tensions between two powers: we find the same springs as in exchanges under the Cold Waranalyzes historian Andrei Kozovoi, a conflict that wasn’t really a conflict, a kind of impossible nuclear war. »
What comfort, according to him, those who would see between the two countries a new war by proxy. But the lecturer at the University of Lille notes a big difference between the two periods: the profile of the prisoners. Yesterday spies or presumed to be such by the enemy. Today convicts with strong media coverage.
During the Cold War, the “bridge of spies”
Even on July 9, 2010, the date of the biggest spy swap since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the deal struck was still tinged with the Cold War. At Vienna airport, ten Russian agents deported from the United States against four Russians convicted of spying for Western countries. Among the latter, a certain Sergei Skripal, victim with his daughter in 2018, in the south of England, of an attempted murder by poisoning with Novichok, a Russian neurotoxin.
During the Cold War, the most famous exchanges did not take place on a tarmac, but via the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, also known as the “Bridge of Spies”, linking at the time the American zone of West Berlin and the East German city of Potsdam. In 1962, the American aviator Francis Gary Powers, captured by the Soviets, will be released there against William Fischer, head of a clandestine network of spies in the United States.
In 1985, the bridge will see the exchange of 25 East Germans or Poles, approached by the CIA to spy on sensitive sites, for four KGB agents. The following year, the Russian dissident Natan Sharansky joined the Western zone, a few minutes before another exchange between three prisoners from the East and five captives from the West. Far from the bridge, in September 1986, the United States will release Guennadi Zakhaov, imprisoned for espionage, against the American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, accused of the same grievance.
“At the time, there was a certain codification, a logic of profiles: people of real strategic value, whose rescue was as much a humanitarian issue as an operational one.observes Jean de Gliniasty, former French ambassador to Russia (2009-2013) and director of research at Iris. Today, the relative value of each prisoner is linked to the media force of his journey or his condemnation. This is what allows Putin to recover a real criminal against two Americans with more than dubious charges. »