Was Griner trade a good prisoner swap?

When basketball great Brittney Griner got on the plane taking her home after living the hell that is a Russian penal colony, her first words were: “I want to talk.”

Not, as it happens, about anything in particular — though she no doubt has some stories to tell. Just to in English, to fellow Americans. Anyone who would listen.

And so she talked, passengers on the small jet say, for about 12 hours of the 18-hour flight home. Understandable. Who among us wouldn’t be bottled up, verbally, after 10 months in a foreign prison?

Fellow Americans are all certainly glad Griner, the twotime Olympic gold medalist and star for the Phoenix Mercury, has been released.

But that release was secured by the United States government in exchange for one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, Viktor Bout, a vicious character right out of a John le Carre Cold War spy novel, the kind of doubledealer who was literally a double-dealer: Famous for selling weapons to both sides of small wars in Africa and the Middle East.

Bout had served 14 years of a 25-year sentence for conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials, delivery of anti-aircraft missiles and providing aid to a terrorist organization.

Was it appropriate for a Russian citizen such as that, literally a danger to world peace, to be traded for an American citizen who is a basketball player?

That’s our Question of the Week for readers.

The pros are clear. An American is no longer detained in the country of gulags where she would have been held for as long as Bout for the crime of possessing a tiny amount of cannabis oil — prescribed for her by her physician, fully legal here.

If Griner was set up, if the Russians nabbed her precisely in order to make such a prisoner swap, does that just make the Kremlin’s game possible?

Some say the U.S. shouldn’t have agreed to the exchange unless American Paul Whelan, held on espionage charges, was also released. Do you agree? Should that have been a deal-breaker? Or is freeing one American always better than freeing no Americans?

Email your thoughts to opinion@scng.com. Please include your full name and city or community of residence. Provide a daytime phone number (it will not be published).