Brittney Griner ‘talked about everything under the sun’ with flight crew on trip home after prisoner exchange
Brittney Griner was ready to talk on her 18-hour flight back to the United States earlier this week.
According to special presidential envoy for hostage affairs Roger Carstens, who helped secure Griner’s release from a Russian prison, the WNBA star spoke with him and others for nearly two-thirds of the flight from the United Arab Emirates to San Antonio on Thursday.
“When she finally got onto the U.S. plane, I said, ‘Brittney, you must have been through a lot over the last 10 months. Here’s your seat. Please feel free to decompress. We’ll give you your space,’” Carstens said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” on Sunday.
“And she said, ‘Oh no. I’ve been in prison for 10 months now listening to Russian, I want to talk. But first of all, who are these guys?’ And she moved right past me and went to every member on that crew, looked them in the eyes, shook their hands and asked about them and got their names, making a personal connection with them. It was really amazing. And then later on, on an 18 hour flight, she probably spent 12 hours just talking and we talked about everything under the sun.”
Griner was released from a Russian prison Thursday after the United States agreed to exchange convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout. The exchange took place in the UAE, where Carstens and other officials made the swap at the Abu Dhabi International Airport.
Russian state media release footage of the Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout prisoner swap: https://t.co/TuMxKvMmmI pic.twitter.com/xVgtQjrGbf
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) December 8, 2022
Carstens said that, even though the circumstances weren’t great, it was an honor to meet Griner. He described her as “an intelligent, passionate, compassionate, humble, interesting person, a patriotic person, but above all, authentic.”
“It is humbling. I’m very grateful that President Biden allows me the chance to do this job,” Carstens said. “It’s also a painful job. So when you get the chance to shake someone’s hand, it’s one of the rare moments that you get to celebrate a victory.”
What about Paul Whelan?
Retired Marine Paul Whelan was not included in the prisoner swap, something Carstens was asked about Sunday morning.
Whelan is currently serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony on espionage charges, something he and the State Department say are baseless.
Biden said Thursday that there was no opportunity to include Whelan in the deal to bring Griner home. Carstens reiterated that point, and said he has talked with Whelan since the deal went down.
“I said, ‘Paul, you have the commitment of this President. The President’s focused, the secretary of state’s focused. I’m certainly focused, and we’re gonna bring you home,’” he said.
“And I reminded him, I said, ‘Paul, when you were in the Marines, and I was in the Army, they always reminded you to keep the faith’ and I said, ‘Keep the faith. We’re coming to get you. … We weren’t able to get you out of this go around. We could not get the deal with the Russians. But had we not made the deal, then Brittany would not have come home. There was no opportunity to bring you home at this time.’”
