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Brittney Griner is coming home

Like many, I'm really glad to see her coming back, sorry we had to give up an arms dealer to get it done.
 
Lots of salty people upset that we exchanged "an arms dealer" for Griner. They'll have to get over it because what's done is done. Griner should have never been in that situation to begin with. It was all a ploy of Putin due to Russia's invasion Ukraine and the resultant sanctions. The Griners are together again and that's all I care about now.
 


Like many, I'm really glad to see her coming back, sorry we had to give up an arms dealer to get it done.

She was literally a victim of opportunity. Russia / Putin had been trying to get the arms dealer free since the Obama administration, they saw this as their possible biggest chance.

With the mid terms passed, it was finally time to get this deal done for Russia & get Putin's boy home. Unfortunately for the others, Russia wasn't having anyone else released unless there were completely unacceptable ( like admitting Whelan was a spy, even if he wasn't ) that the administration couldn't risk getting at least Britney home.
 
And Paul Whelan was supposedly a Mango supporter 🤷‍♂️


“David Whelan, brother of detained American Paul Whelan, told MSNBC’s Zinhle Essamuah that President Joe Biden’s administration is “much more engaged” than former President Donald Trump’s was in seeking the release of wrongfully imprisoned Americans like his brother.

DAVID WHELAN: … "I think President Biden made the right choice, which is that an American should come home if they can come home… I think the first two years, partly I think the Trump administration was not prepared to or not interested in working on wrongful detention cases…The Biden administration is much more engaged in wrongful detentions and the executive order that President Biden passed or signed last year, plus the Levinson Act, have given the government more tools to help wrongful detainee families, but also to try to start to punish the nations who are doing that. So we’re seeing improvement...”
 
Joe Biden has worked out another prisoner swap with Putin. Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan will be freed!


PS - Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is being released too. Here's a recent interview with her family:

 
Waiting for the inevitable “If I’d been president this would’ve been done a long time ago!” from Trump.

The fact that it was Biden who worked out the deal with Putin's Russia -- and with Germany and Poland and Turkey and god knows who else, well that puts paid to Trump's fantasy. He can always wonder now if Putin was signaling he'd rather work with a professional head of state like Biden or Harris rather than with a shoot-from-hip social media poster like Donald Trump.

Even Gershkovich's employer the WSJ is giving credit to Joe Biden in its live news feed,
 
Waiting for the inevitable “If I’d been president this would’ve been done a long time ago!” from Trump.

No doubt. By Trump's self-assessment he's the sole savior of the planet.

However... if in Putin's calculations the linchpin to any successful post-2019 high level prisoner swap was always going to be the release to Russia from Germany of Vadim Krasikov, the guy who had assassinated a Chechen rebel fighter's exile in broad daylight in Berlin, that deal was never going to get made by Donald Trump.

Trump's misogyny and early public disrespect for Angela Merkel --as then chancellor of Germany and then de facto head of the EU as well-- were apparent, and would have been insurmountable obstacles to US-Russian prisoner exchange negotiations involving Germany, no matter the passage of time and change in the German chancellorship.

If Trump had been the US President when Gershkovich was detained by Russia, even though by then Merkel had already been succeeeded by Olaf Scholz, there's no way Germany would have facilitated a US-Russia prisoner swap by releasing Krasikov. Such was the level of the German leadership's lingering remembrance of Trump's extreme boorishness.

There's a price that gets paid for notably undiplomatic behavior at high levels. Sometimes it gets exacted years later. Because of Trump's prior bad acts vis a vis Merkel, Biden's administration had to work all the harder to get Scholz to agree to his crucial part of the complex trade that wrapped up today.
 
Weird story about a prisoner who wasn’t released: Marc Fogel.

His sister gave an interview, clearly disappointed that her brother, serving around 15 years for having medical marijuana (similar to Brittney Griner’s conviction). Now, I understand they cannot free everybody, but it was a bit weird that the sister thought the reason was that her brother isn’t famous.

There were a number of non-famous people released today. I wondered what the family would be doing to hopefully get Marc home. Well…


So, they’ve been lobbying Trump to try and secure their family member’s release? Are they true believers that think he actually won in 2020? Do they just hate Biden and refuse to call and ask for help despite Marc being in a Russian prison?


Seems like the plan is to latch themselves to Republicans, hope for a Trump win, and/or hope that attacking the Biden administration would work for them. Somehow I feel they let their MAGA beliefs overshadow what might actually be best for Marc.

I am certain Marc wasn’t intentionally excluded by Biden. But seeing the family waste their time and efforts pleading with an orange buffoon who isn’t President, can’t do anything for them and doesn’t give a 💩 about them is just plain sad.
 
Weird story about a prisoner who wasn’t released: Marc Fogel.

His sister gave an interview, clearly disappointed that her brother, serving around 15 years for having medical marijuana (similar to Brittney Griner’s conviction). Now, I understand they cannot free everybody, but it was a bit weird that the sister thought the reason was that her brother isn’t famous.

There were a number of non-famous people released today. I wondered what the family would be doing to hopefully get Marc home. Well…


So, they’ve been lobbying Trump to try and secure their family member’s release? Are they true believers that think he actually won in 2020? Do they just hate Biden and refuse to call and ask for help despite Marc being in a Russian prison?


Seems like the plan is to latch themselves to Republicans, hope for a Trump win, and/or hope that attacking the Biden administration would work for them. Somehow I feel they let their MAGA beliefs overshadow what might actually be best for Marc.

I am certain Marc wasn’t intentionally excluded by Biden. But seeing the family waste their time and efforts pleading with an orange buffoon who isn’t President, can’t do anything for them and doesn’t give a 💩 about them is just plain sad.

It's hard to know what that family's initial approach was to getting some help, or when they reached out for assistance in knowing "next steps" in trying to arrange assistance of the US government in obtaining release of a person detained abroad.

The process seems daunting but a Congressional rep should have been able to sort through the situation and get them on the right track. For openers, the US code is pretty clear on the criteria involved for getting a "wrongful detention" classification.


Not sure why the family feels that attacking the current administration in public is helpful to their cause. I'm sure the Biden administration is capable of setting that aside considering the understandable distress any family in similar situation feels today, when other detained persons may be freed and yet their own loved one is still in the "left behind" category. But it just means having to make extra effort to focus on next steps in the process of getting all Americans back home from an uncertain future as a detainee in Russia.

On the PBS news tonight after the segment on the prisoner swap had concluded, the program published a factoid stating that an average of nine persons a year have been detained in Russia between 2022 and now.

Maybe it's high time the US Department of State began more than "strongly discouraging" travel by civilians to Putin's Russia, no matter the reason. It has become obvious that it doesn't take much for an American to end up arrested in Russia these days, and for not much more than breathing while possessing an American passport.

So... time for the USA's would-be travelers to Russia to wake up. This is long since not Gorbachev's era of glasnost and perestroika that (inadvertently) brought the end of the USSR and a wary re-examination of cold war relationships between the US, Russia and the former satellite states of the USSR. Those days are over. Putin basically brought the expansion of NATO and its nearness now to Russia upon himself. But it has hardened his suspicion and anger at the West, especially the USA.

So this is a time when Putin seeks to finalize the reversion of Russia to autocracy with himself at the top and a bunch of made-powerless rubber stamps below. He's made quite a few mistakes (and so have his intel services , when you think about how many of them have got grabbed up around the world in the past two decades), and that plu the gone-wrong power grab in Ukraine has embarrassed and infuriated him.

He's not unlike a cornered woodchuck, enraged at sensing vulnerability -- the deteriorating economic, social, structural conditions at home and the increasing interest of Central Asian republics that see opportunities to do business with his nominal ally and their own neighbor China-- and yet he's still quintessentially dangerous because he may lose control and decide if he can't have his own way, no one else can have anything either and he'll burn it all down. He's not there yet. He may never get there since he doesn't even trust his own military. But he has increasingly taken to regarding detentions of Americans as tangible tokens of his powe, even as he mortages the future of his country and his own reign by his ongoing provocations in Ukraine.

I don't blame any family with a loved one still detained in Russia tonight for being alarmed. There is likely that sense of having missed a last boat. It's probably not the case, but then Putin grows unpredictable in trying to avoid facing limits on his ability to wind up that war in Ukraine in a manner that can look worth the sacrifice.
 
It's hard to know what that family's initial approach was to getting some help, or when they reached out for assistance in knowing "next steps" in trying to arrange assistance of the US government in obtaining release of a person detained abroad.

The process seems daunting but a Congressional rep should have been able to sort through the situation and get them on the right track. For openers, the US code is pretty clear on the criteria involved for getting a "wrongful detention" classification.


Not sure why the family feels that attacking the current administration in public is helpful to their cause. I'm sure the Biden administration is capable of setting that aside considering the understandable distress any family in similar situation feels today, when other detained persons may be freed and yet their own loved one is still in the "left behind" category. But it just means having to make extra effort to focus on next steps in the process of getting all Americans back home from an uncertain future as a detainee in Russia.

On the PBS news tonight after the segment on the prisoner swap had concluded, the program published a factoid stating that an average of nine persons a year have been detained in Russia between 2022 and now.

Maybe it's high time the US Department of State began more than "strongly discouraging" travel by civilians to Putin's Russia, no matter the reason. It has become obvious that it doesn't take much for an American to end up arrested in Russia these days, and for not much more than breathing while possessing an American passport.

So... time for the USA's would-be travelers to Russia to wake up. This is long since not Gorbachev's era of glasnost and perestroika that (inadvertently) brought the end of the USSR and a wary re-examination of cold war relationships between the US, Russia and the former satellite states of the USSR. Those days are over. Putin basically brought the expansion of NATO and its nearness now to Russia upon himself. But it has hardened his suspicion and anger at the West, especially the USA.

So this is a time when Putin seeks to finalize the reversion of Russia to autocracy with himself at the top and a bunch of made-powerless rubber stamps below. He's made quite a few mistakes (and so have his intel services , when you think about how many of them have got grabbed up around the world in the past two decades), and that plu the gone-wrong power grab in Ukraine has embarrassed and infuriated him.

He's not unlike a cornered woodchuck, enraged at sensing vulnerability -- the deteriorating economic, social, structural conditions at home and the increasing interest of Central Asian republics that see opportunities to do business with his nominal ally and their own neighbor China-- and yet he's still quintessentially dangerous because he may lose control and decide if he can't have his own way, no one else can have anything either and he'll burn it all down. He's not there yet. He may never get there since he doesn't even trust his own military. But he has increasingly taken to regarding detentions of Americans as tangible tokens of his powe, even as he mortages the future of his country and his own reign by his ongoing provocations in Ukraine.

I don't blame any family with a loved one still detained in Russia tonight for being alarmed. There is likely that sense of having missed a last boat. It's probably not the case, but then Putin grows unpredictable in trying to avoid facing limits on his ability to wind up that war in Ukraine in a manner that can look worth the sacrifice.
It does appear that members of both parties have been hard at work trying to secure his release.


Also, a Biden official today did say on camera that he was wrongly detained. So maybe that was a sign that he will be given that designation officially.

I think it comes down to: Putin is not going to release everybody. But maybe there is hope for Marc and his family, as Putin is getting a lot of good press at home for the swap.
 
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