The Kremlin refuses to assess Griner’s sentence and rejects a public negotiation with the US to exchange prisoners

Aug. 5 () –

The Kremlin has refused this Friday to assess the nine-year prison sentence for drug possession and trafficking against the American basketball player Brittney Griner and has warned the United States that it will not accept any public negotiations to exchange prisoners.

“As long as we start discussing nuances about exchanges in the media, these exchanges will never happen,” said Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov, who has already accused the United States of “making that mistake” by leaking first , and confirm after, information about the conversations.

The United States, as reported by Bloomberg earlier this month, citing sources close to the negotiations, would have asked Russia to release Griner and former US Marine Paul Whelan, convicted of espionage, in exchange for returning convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout to Moscow.

This Thursday, the spokesman for the National Security Council, John Kirby, confirmed the existence of a negotiation by inviting Russia to accept a “substantial offer” from Washington in exchange for Griner and Whelan, although without mentioning Bout by name. Bloomberg sources reported at the time that Moscow considers the US offer insufficient.

Peskov has strongly condemned this way of publishing the negotiations. “Suddenly, the United States has taken to solving these kinds of issues through ‘megaphone diplomacy’ and that’s not how things are done, so without comment,” Peskov settled in his appearance this Friday, collected by the TASS agency.

The spokesman has reiterated that the United States and Russia have their own private communication mechanisms to deal with this class of issues and warned for the last time that “any public communication threatens to ruin” these kinds of channels.