A Russian court on Tuesday upheld the American basketball star Brittney Griner’s sentence on drug smuggling charges, clearing the way for her to serve nine years in a penal colony, unless the U.S. government can negotiate a deal for her release.
Ms. Griner’s lawyers said before the hearing on Tuesday that she did “not expect any miracles to happen,” but that she was hopeful that the three-judge panel of the appeals court in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, would reduce her sentence.
While the court’s decision means Ms. Griner will begin serving her sentence soon, it was not immediately clear if her legal options were exhausted. There are two higher courts above the appellate division, culminating in the Supreme Court, but Ms. Griner’s lawyers have yet to confirm whether they will take the case any further.
Higher courts in Russia also are not known for overturning verdicts, especially in a case involving foreign policy and the interests of the Kremlin.
The basketball star, 31, did not appear in court on Tuesday and participated in the proceedings via a video link from the detention center where she has been held since her arrest in February.
“Brittney is a very strong person and has a champion’s character,” the lawyers said in their statement on Monday. “She of course has her highs and lows as she is severely stressed being separated from her loved ones for over eight months.”
Since she was arrested at a Moscow airport days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Ms. Griner’s fate has become entangled in the increasingly acrimonious relations between Moscow and Washington. As the Biden administration enforces harsh sanctions against President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as punishment for the invasion, American officials have accused Russia of using Ms. Griner and other U.S. citizens in Russian custody as bargaining chips.
In July, the Biden administration offered a prisoner swap involving Ms. Griner, but Russian officials have said it was premature to discuss a deal while her case was underway. One person briefed on the talks said at the time that the United States had proposed exchanging Ms. Griner — along with Paul Whelan, a former Marine held since December 2018 — for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year federal prison sentence for charges including conspiring to kill Americans.
President Biden and Mr. Putin are both expected to attend a summit of Group of 20 leaders next month in Indonesia, and Mr. Biden has said he would only speak with the Russian leader there if it was to discuss Ms. Griner’s case.
Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and ambassador to the United Nations who has been unofficially negotiating with Russian officials as a private citizen, said in October that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan could be exchanged before the end of the year.
But Russia is a stickler for bureaucratic proceedings, so it is unlikely that negotiating any exchange can begin in earnest until the judicial process has run its course.
Ms. Griner, an all-star center with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was arrested on Feb. 17 in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where she had arrived from the United States. She was en route to Yekaterinburg, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, where she played for a women’s basketball team. Customs officials in Moscow said they had found two vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage and detained her.
Ms. Griner admitted her guilt in court but insisted that she had no intention to break the law, saying that the small amount of hashish oil appeared in her luggage because of negligence. She told the court that she had made “an honest mistake.”
Since she was sentenced in August, her lawyers have argued that the nine-year prison term — near the 10-year maximum for such a conviction — was too harsh for a first-time offense and was politically motivated.
In an interview with “CBS Mornings” this month, Ms. Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, said that she had been able to speak to her only twice since she was detained and was increasingly worried about her. The most recent conversation, she said, was so troubling that she cried for two or three days afterward.
“It was the most disturbing phone call I’d ever experienced,” she told the interviewer, Gayle King, adding that her wife worried about being abandoned in Russia.
Ms. Griner’s lawyers said that she was allowed to walk outside once a day in a small courtyard at her detention center. She spends the rest of her time in a small cell with two cellmates, sitting and sleeping on a specially elongated bed to accommodate her 6-foot-9 frame.
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