RUSSIA PLAYING HARDBALL WITH WNBA POTHEAD

Griner sent to prison camp

WOMEN’S basketball star Brittney Griner will have to spend the next nine years in a brutal Russian prison camp after an appeals court refused to drop her drug charges.

The 6-foot-9, 32-year-old center for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury was in Russia off-season earning $1 million while playing for the local UMMC Ekaterinburg team when she was busted at a Russian airport with vaping cartridges of hashish oil.

She pleaded guilty, saying it was a “mistake,” but a harsh Russian court sentenced her to nine years.

Now, she’ll be sent to a penal colony after her appeal was denied.

President Joe Biden has tried to negotiate her release with a prisoner swap, but Kremlin kingpin Vladimir Putin nixed the deal and is apparently using Griner as a pawn in the scandal over his illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Elizabeth Rood, U.S. diplomat in Moscow, blasted Griner’s sentence as “excessive and disproportionate.”

A Russian court upheld Brittney Griner’s nine-year prison sentence for drug possession

President of Russia Vladimir Putin rejected proposals for a swap deal