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A week before the Russian Army invaded Afghanistan, Brittney Griner flew into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. The Russian Federal Customs Service discovered vape cartridges with small amounts of cannabis oil in her luggage and arrested her.
She had arrived as one of the elite athletes in women’s professional sports, winner of an NCAA national championship, an Olympic gold medal and a WNBA world championship.
Now she stood on the edge of the abyss.
Today we name Brittney Griner “Arizonan of the Year” because no other Arizona newsmaker in 2022 captured the public eye as intensely as she did. Nor has anyone’s story in this state aroused the kind of fear and foreboding that hers had for nearly 300 days.
Griner found herself caught in a war
Griner found herself not only caught in a war between the Russians and Ukrainians, but in an historic shift in global world order. Russia had awakened the NATO defense alliance and Western Europe rallied to arm and fund the Ukrainian resistance.
Griner’s fate was now in the hands of one of the most brutal authoritarians on the planet – Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Many have argued that Griner had no one to blame but herself for her predicament – that she broke Russian law and now would pay the consequences.
Those people fail to understand the essential nature of Vladimir Putin and the Russian justice system.
If the Russians were taking one of the world’s great athletes prisoner a week before their invasion, we think that wasn’t likely a coincidence. When the Russians announced the bazaar is open and Griner could be had for a price, well, there’s a name for that kind of behavior. We call it hostage-taking.
Putin’s bad behavior is well chronicled
Justice in Russia is what Vladimir Putin says is justice, and so Putin would ultimately decide her fate.
For Griner, it was like entering a dark room.
Putin’s bad behavior is well chronicled. He has seized control of his country and its economy and runs it like a Mafia don, enriching himself and his business sycophants. He has ordered the murder of Russian journalists and dissidents.
He is a vainglorious fanatic of Russia’s imperial past and celebrates it by invading his neighbors – first Georgia, then Crimea, then eastern Ukraine and finally Ukraine proper.
It was that last invasion that has sealed his reputation as a modern monster – in which he gave his troops authority to summarily execute Ukrainian men and women and used his bombers to try to wipe out Ukrainian society.
That he controlled Brittney Griner’s fate could have meant almost anything, from imprisonment to slave labor to torture to death in one of the old Soviet gulags.
Griner was sent to Russia’s worst prison
A young woman who enjoyed so much of America’s abundance, its freedom and opportunity, saw in a matter of hours in a Moscow airport her entire life turned upside down. She now had no rights and perhaps no future.
The Russian court found her guilty and sentenced her to nine years in prison. She was assigned to the most notorious women’s prison in the Motherland – IK-2, in the Mordovia region some 300 miles east of Moscow.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian punk band and protest group Pussy Riot, had served time in another Mordovian prison and called IK-2 the worst in the country. It is known for its slave labor, filthy living conditions, rotten food and torture, she told world media.
Tolokonnikova had become one of Griner’s most ferocious advocates, keeping her case in front of the cameras and describing the outrages of Russian penal colonies.
In the United States, Griner’s wife, Cherelle, worked with American civil rights leaders and the WNBA and NBA to keep a spotlight on her predicament and gain the attention of the White House.
WNBA worked to elevate Griner’s cause
The women of the WNBA, who honed their protests skills during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020, built a high-profile campaign – “We are BG” – and teamed with NBA greats to generate enormous star power around Griner’s cause.
‘That’s our sister’:WNBA players vow to keep Griner in spotlight
The Biden White House cleverly worked to use Griner’s celebrity to try to piggyback another American hostage, Paul Whelan, onto a deal for Griner in return for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, also known as the “Merchant of Death.”
After months of waiting on the Russians, the White House learned the only deal possible was a straight one-on-one trade for Griner. The Russians – for whatever reason – weren’t willing to include Whelan in any deal, White House officials said.
After 294 days in captivity, Brittney Griner was headed back to the United States.
Not all the U.S. reaction was positive.
Griner drew attention to other hostages
Some conservatives remembered that Griner had called on her own Phoenix Mercury team in 2020 to stop playing the national anthem. We would remind those critics that she did that during a cultural awakening in which African Americans were drawing attention not only to the modern mistreatment of their people but the atrocities committed over centuries against them.
It goes without saying that the African American experience is different than the European American experience, and if Black people have used their American birthright to protest racism, they have done so to make this country better and more worthy of its founding ideals.
Brittney Griner cannot help but be changed by this experience that might have ended life as she knew it. We would have encouraged her to take her new freedom and use it to help draw attention to other American hostages in Russia, including Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel.
But such is her character, she had already begun doing that in her correspondence to President Joe Biden while still a prisoner in Russia.
Her statement upon her release underscored that commitment: “”President Biden, you brought me home and I know you are committed to bringing Paul Whelan and all Americans home too. I will use my platform to do whatever I can to help you. I also encourage everyone that played a part in bringing me home to continue their efforts to bring all Americans home. Every family deserves to be whole.”
It’s not out of any personal valor or past achievement that we name Brittney Griner “Arizonan of the Year,” but as a solitary person who got caught in the tectonic shifts of history and became our state’s most important newsmaker in 2022.
This is an opinion of The Arizona Republic’s editorial board.
Past Arizonans of the Year
- 2021: Election defenders. Six Republican elected leaders risked political destruction to stand for true election integrity.
- 2020: Arizona’s health care workers. For their professionalism, their commitment to their fellow human beings and for their endurance in a pandemic whose end was not in sight.
- 2019: Tom Buschatzke and Ted Cooke. These water managers overcame differences to help forge an historic compromise on our Colorado River water supply.
- 2018: Kyrsten Sinema. Not only is she Arizona’s first female senator, but her insistence on bipartisanship shows us how politics should be.
- 2017: John McCain and Jeff Flake. Arizona’s senators stuck out their necks and paid the price for it. And in so doing, reminded us of core American values.
- 2016: OSIRIS-REx. The space mission headed by Arizona scientists promises to reveal key parts of who we are.
- 2015: Doug Ducey. Arizona’s new governor had two huge policy wins in his first year in office.
- 2014: VA whistleblowers. They braved an angry, vindictive administration to shine light on the poor treatment of veterans.
- 2013: Yarnell volunteers. Those who helped the victims of the fire that killed 19 hotshots are a perfect picture of selflessness.
- 2012: Jon Kyl. The Arizona congressman’s work ethic and unique willingness to delve into the details astonished supporters and exhausted the opposition.
- 2011: Gabrielle Giffords. The Arizona congresswoman became an example of strength and resilience, and a model for Arizona and the nation.
- 2010: The volunteer. In the worst economic times in a generation, volunteers were never so sorely needed nor so appreciated.
- 2009: Sandra Day O’Connor (Arizonan of the Decade). The former U.S. Supreme Court justice’s accomplishments made her one of the most powerful people in the world.
- 2008: John McCain. For his historic run for the presidency, his stoic leadership during the darkest hours of the Iraq War and his valiant fight for immigration reform.
- 2007: Philanthropic foundations. A group, not a person, earned the distinction for its hard work, generosity and critical mass.
- 2006: Michael Crow. Arizona State University’s 16th president took risks that have transformed ASU.
- 2005: Jim Kolbe. The Arizona congressman tackled Social Security and immigration reform when others preferred to steer clear.
- 2004: Pat Tillman. He put aside a football career with the Arizona Cardinals to serve his country and give his life as an Army Ranger.
- 2003: Sandra Day O’Connor. In a year that saw historic decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, her opinion almost always counted most.
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