Quote Originally Posted by Phredd3 View Post

I tend to think Griner is a political prisoner, period.
Yuval Weber, an expert in Russian military and political strategy, told Yahoo Sports last week that he expected Griner to receive the maximum possible sentence or close to it. The way Weber saw it, Russian government officials would dictate the length of Griner’s punishment based on what would allow them to extract the most out of the U.S. in negotiations for a prisoner swap or some other concession.

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“The political calculus, which the Kremlin knows, is that Biden cannot let her sit in a Russian prison for that long,” Partlett said.

The one thing unanimously agreed on by experts is that Griner’s punishment wasn’t the judge’s decision alone. Former State Department foreign services officer David Salvo said high-ranking Russian officials likely dictated Griner’s sentence based on objectives that Russia was seeking to achieve.
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/brittne...152534083.html