SAN ANTONIO - Basketball star Brittney Griner landed in the US on Friday after 10 months in Russian detention following a prisoner swop with arms dealer Viktor Bout who flew home hours earlier to embrace his family on the airport tarmac in Moscow.

Securing Thursday’s swop, after months of painstaking negotiations, was a rare instance of US-Russian cooperation after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, although the Kremlin was quick to say it did not show improving relations.

Russia’s state media trumpeted the swop as a win for Moscow, after the release of a man whom the US Department of Justice has described as one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers who had sold weapons across the globe to terrorists and America’s enemies for decades. Mr Bout always denied the charges.

US President Joe Biden, in announcing her release on Thursday, said the swop ended what he described as months of “hell” for Ms Griner, 32, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and star of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Mercury.

“So happy to have Brittney back on US soil. Welcome home BG!,” US Special Presidential Envoy Roger Carstens, the chief US hostage coordinator, said in a post on Twitter.

White House spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC in an interview that Ms Griner appeared in good health and in good spirits after landing at a Texas airport.

She is now headed to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for an evaluation, Mr Kirby told MSNBC. Her family has asked for privacy as she transitions back home. 

Ms Griner, who flew into San Antonio, Texas, before dawn on Friday, had been arrested on Feb 17 at a Moscow airport after vape cartridges containing cannabis oil, which is banned in Russia, were found in her luggage.

As she flew back home, Mr Bout, nicknamed the “merchant of death”, arrived in Moscow and hugged his mother and wife after stepping onto the tarmac, television images showed.

He said it was difficult to find the words to describe his feelings, in an interview with the state-run news outlet RT. He also said he had not encountered much anti-Russian sentiment during his imprisonment in the United States.

Mr Bout rejected the idea that Russia got the best of the exchange however, or that it had made Mr Biden look “weak”.

“I wouldn’t draw such a conclusion... I’m pretty sure that neither our leadership, nor any other, thinks in such notions - whether you are weak or not,” he said.

Mr Biden personally tracked the negotiations closely, but it was only in recent weeks that he made the “very painful” decision to provide clemency to Mr Bout to get the swop done, a senior US official told reporters on Thursday.

A joint UAE-Saudi Arabia statement said the UAE president and Saudi crown prince led mediation efforts that secured Ms Griner’s release. But White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refuted the notion of any mediation role, and US officials expressed gratitude only for the UAE providing “an important transit site to facilitate the exchange”.

‘Sorry state’

Ms Griner, who had been detained in Russia since a week before the invasion of Ukraine, travelled from a Russian penal colony to Moscow, then to Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates where the exchange took place, with the two walking past each other on the tarmac, US officials said.

“Bilateral relations continue to remain in a sorry state,” TASS news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Friday.

“The talks were exclusively on the topic of the exchange. It’s probably wrong to draw any hypothetical conclusions that this may be a step towards overcoming the crisis in bilateral relations,” he said.

But Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow and Washington would continue to talk about possible prisoner swops directly, without intermediaries, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russian state news agencies also quoted Mr Ryabkov as saying lower level Russian and US diplomats met in Istanbul on Friday to discuss a number of issues.

The White House has said this week’s prisoner exchange does not not change Washington’s support for Ukrainians following Russia’s invasion, which Moscow calls a “special military operation” to “denazify” and disarm its neighbour.

The two countries also swopped prisoners in April when Russia released former US Marine Trevor Reed and the US released Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko.

Excluded from Thursday’s prisoner swop was another high-profile US detainee Paul Whelan who told CNN by phone that he was “greatly disappointed” more had not been done to secure his release.

US officials had been pressing for the release of both Ms Griner and Whelan, a former US Marine held on what Washington called “sham” espionage charges, and had proposed multiple options that would have included him in a prisoner exchange, a Biden administration official said.

But Moscow, the official said, insisted on treating Whelan’s case differently. REUTERS