Politics is at play here! According to Putin’s aide, Yury Ushakov jailed Brittney Griner isn’t a priority and Joe Biden only wants her released to make him good ahead of the midterms elections.
According to the Daily Mail;
An aide to Vladimir Putin has said freeing WNBA star Brittney Griner from prison ‘is not a priority’ for the Kremlin. The 31-year-old, a two-time Olympic basketball gold medalist, was arrested in February after she was allegedly caught carrying two vape cartridges containing cannabis oil at a Moscow airport by a police dog.
She was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison on August 4 after pleading guilty. Yury Ushakov, an advisor to Putin who spent a decade as Russia’s ambassador to the United States between 1998 and 2008, believes Joe Biden merely wants to boost his grim-looking midterm election prospects.
Ushakov told Rossiya-1 on Sunday: ‘In this tense situation, I think that he is thinking first and foremost about the upcoming midterm elections so he keeps emphasizing the need to bring back home the basketball player who was detained for drug smuggling. However, it’s not the main issue that we are concerned about.’ The Kremlin aide’s comments come days after Griner’s lawyer, Alexandr D. Boykov, said in an interview with the New York Times that his client is struggling in prison.
Boykov described Griner saying: ‘She has not been in as good condition as I could sometimes find her in.’ According to the lawyer, Griner is reading a book about the Rolling Stones, Dostoyevsky’s book Demons and regularly plays a game that’s similar to Battleship.’ He said that Griner is forced to sleep in a bed that has been modified to accommodate her height.
Her attorney continued: ‘She is not yet absolutely convinced that America will be able to take her home. She is very worried about what the price of that will be, and she is afraid that she will have to serve the whole sentence here in Russia.’ Boykov said that he last spoke to Griner on October 11. He said that she is worried about the conditions she will face in a new prison following her appeal. He added: ‘Perhaps the verdict will somehow be changed and, perhaps, the sentence will be reduced, because the decision taken by the first court is very different from judicial practice.’
‘Considering all the circumstances, taking into account my client’s personality traits and her admission of guilt, such a verdict should be absolutely impossible,’ the lawyer continued.
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