There’s an unforgettable description in a recent New York profile of Brittney Griner, who endured a few difficult years of training in Texas only to finally find greatness in women’s basketball.
Griner had grown up “red-haired”, tall and cheerful, and it was the last thing her father couldn’t stand and kicked her out of the house. The two would make peace later, but their reports would fuel their aversion to attention and publicity.
“Brittney Griner doesn’t need to be famous,” her agent Lindsay Colas told the magazine. “He needs to skateboard on the street at dusk with an ice popsicle. “
Today, Griner is in the highest grades of her sport, NCAA, Olympic and WNBA champion. And, as usual, he took his skateboard, as he did in each and every one of the WNBA’s low seasons, when he went to play professional basketball in Yekaterinburg, a town in central Russia, in the icy bleeding between the Urals and Siberia.
This time he would ride his skateboard in the regimental lines of history.
As the story progresses, it can be incredibly cruel. At some other time, when history in motion, Yekaterinburg, the scene of epic and tragic events.
It was there, in 1918, that the Bolshevik revolutionaries awakened the Russian imperial circle of captive relatives in the space of a wealthy merchant. They were lowered into a basement where a firing squad murdered Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters, a son and the other servants.
By the way, the story would revolve around Griner.
On February 17, 2022, she was arrested at a Moscow airport for possessing a small amount of cannabis oil for vaping. He returned to Russia.
Exactly one week later, the Russian army invaded Ukraine, mobilized the Ukrainian army, and destabilized the global order. No one knows how it all ends. But the young man on the skateboard is caught in the middle.
Some Americans blamed Griner for their situation, which ignored warnings from the Russian mobilization to stay out of that country and possess marijuana.
They lose the peak.
Griner is held hostage by a brutal regime that cares little about human life and, indeed, not his own. This week, it has become clearer that the Russians are now Griner, the reluctant celebrity, to shoot the American channel and embarrass its president, Joe. Biden, who leads the world’s opposition to Russia’s invasion.
Despite Griner’s Imprisonment: Americans Still Play Basketball in Russia
On Monday, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman accused biden’s White House of delaying negotiations for the return of Griner and a momentary American hostage, Paul Whelan.
“We have said so many times that we are in a position to negotiate,” Maria Zakharova said. “If the U. S. Embassy in Moscow has a minute of free time, it will tell President Joe Biden and he, in turn, will tell the families of Whelan and Griner. “
He accused the United States of provoking a “media madness” that of “fulfilling its direct official tasks of keeping in touch with the diplomats of the host country,” according to the Spanish sports newspaper Marca.
Get the image? Americans are dragging their feet. They are involved in Griner’s return.
This is a Russian lie.
In May, the U. S. government The U. S. Department of Homeland Security designated Griner as “unjustly detained” and tasked a special envoy with working with her at the U. S. Embassy. Joe Biden has been in contact with members of the Griner and Whelan family circle for months and recently last Friday.
The Americans have put a deal on the table: Griner and Whelan in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. If the Russians are willing to make an exchange, they know that they have a willing partner.
Knowing that there is great pressure on Biden to bring Griner home, the Russians seem to inflict maximum pain on the Biden White House.
With the best intention of raising Griner’s profile, civil rights advocates made the mistake of American racial policy of trying to dishonor the Biden White House to bring Griner home.
In Russia, they realized.
“(The Russians) have already won,” Dani Gilbert, a U. S. foreign policy and foreign security researcher at Dartmouth, told the New Yorker. prisoner, and they are exploiting a cultural conflict.
“The consequences in the United States: Russia loves it. “
Although most Americans don’t know it, Griner understands the danger he finds himself in. In a letter to Joe Biden, she wrote: “As I sit here in a Russian prison, with my soul quiet and without the cover of my wife, family, friends, Array. . . I’m afraid I’ll be here forever.
As Gilbert told ABC News: “Unfortunately, these processes, tragically, take a long time. When Americans are unjustly detained or taken hostage abroad, they may have left the United States for months or even years because we are dealing with some of our worst adversaries on the global stage.
“It’s not just about what the United States is willing to do to bring our citizens home, but whether or not a state like Russia is willing to settle for the donations we put on the table. “
Brittney Griner’s long road is in the hands of thug Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. As long as Russia rules, it will control its destiny.
Russian courts, Russian law and Russian law are fictions. Putin has mocked all of them with his invasions of Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine and now Ukraine proper.
When you don’t live by civilized rules, you master the game.
“Russia has the merit here, natural and simple,” Gilbert told ABC News. stage for the White House and for the president. “
And for Griner, who is somewhere in a Russian prison, eager to kiss her and skateboard again.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email phil. boas@arizonarepublic. com.
Support journalism: subscribe to azcentral. com today.