Possible Swap: Griner, Whelan and the “Dealer of Death”

On February 17th, 2022, Griner was detained at the Sheremetyevo International Airport where two vape cartridges containing hashish were found in her possession. Cannabis is illegal in Russia. Griner’s defense argued that she did not intend to smuggle the cannabis into the country and that it was used for medicinal purposes only. She pleaded guilty.

Due to both the volatile political situation in Russia, and Ms. Griner’s previous un-American sentiments, there has been a plethora of discourse around this potential exchange. On a video posted to her Instagram, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard lambasts the exchange, stating, “So here’s the question: is the Biden/ Harris administration going to use their power to help free the countless of Americans who are currently being held in our own prisons for cannabis possession? Of course not. This is just another glaring example of their hypocrisy.”  

Though met with much less controversy, Whelan has a shadowy past and was accused by Russia of espionage. Canadian by birth, Paul Whelan holds both United States, British, and Irish citizenship.

According to a 2013 deposition, he worked in law enforcement between 1988 and 2000. However, one of the departments he claimed to work for says they have no record on his employment. He also falsely claimed to hold a college degree. In 1998, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, participating in OIF.

During his time in the Corps, he was court-martialed on multiple counts of larceny. Specifically, he was accused of trying to steal over $10,000 in Iraq and use a false social security number to create an account on a government computer system to grade his own exams.

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For this, he was demoted to an E-4 pay grade and given a bad conduct discharge. After his time in the military, Whelan traveled to Russia several times and maintained a presence on a Russian social media site. During the time of his arrest, he worked as the director of global security and investigations for a Michigan based automotive part company.

This job gave him law enforcement contacts in many countries including Russia. At the time of his arrest, Whelan was allegedly in Moscow for a wedding. He has been imprisoned since 2018.

In exchange for Griner and Whelan, Russia is demanding the release of war criminal Viktor Bout. Known as the “Dealer of Death,” Bout is responsible for supplying weapons to a plethora of small arms conflicts from Latin America to the Balkans. A former military translator, Bout went into the arms trafficking business after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Though he used his air transport companies to transport legal product such as flowers and frozen chicken, the guns he allegedly smuggled weaponized multiple travesties such as the Rwandan Genocide and Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict.

Additionally, he was accused of arming terror groups such as Hezbollah, and paramilitaries such as Columbia’s FARC. It is alleged he also provided aid to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. He has been in a United States prison since 2012. The smattering of conflicts and regions his weapons were smuggled to indicates that bout is a callous individual with no ideology other than profiting off of death.

Bout was loosely portrayed by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie, Lord of War.