Brittany Griner, A Pawn In Putin's War Against America

[Webster]

Opinion | Don't be so quick to think Vladimir Putin won this round

Putin may think he won this round with the U.S., but that doesn't mean we should.

www.msnbc.com

With the news of Brittney Griner’s release from Russian imprisonment Thursday, armchair analysts and experts at using their thumbs on social media are declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin won this round of the ongoing U.S.-Russia discord. Putin himself may certainly think he won; if nothing else, he punished the mind and body of a woman who embodies every identity he wants to suppress and eliminate from Russian life — openly gay and lesbian couples, casual or medicinal users of cannabis, women who threaten chauvinism, and Black people who challenge notions of white supremacy. And Putin gained back a prolific arms dealer, who already served the bulk of his sentence, as part of the prisoner swap that led to Griner’s release.

But in his efforts to secure Griner’s release, President Joe Biden sent the message that the United States values something more than scoring political points through controlling and confining people’s bodies: honoring people as individuals and fighting for the rule of law on the world stage.

At the start of his war with Ukraine, and by extension his intensified conflict with the United States, Putin found in one person the intersections of American identity he needed: a Black, married lesbian woman who uses marijuana and has a large social media following to use as the latest pawn in Russia’s long-standing strategy of wielding America’s diversity to hurt us.

Putin extracted nearly a year of Griner’s life while creating social conflict in America, as people questioned the Biden administration’s efforts and whether a white male sports star, like football player Tom Brady, would ever be imprisoned this long. Others suggested Griner "did the crime" so she should "do the time," comments that ignore unjust legal enforcement and echo the war on drugs rhetoric so commonly used against Black people in America.

Deepening America’s racial divides is part of a long-standing Soviet playbook. As historian Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, whose work focuses on Black identity in the Eastern bloc, explains, “There was heavy Soviet interest in American race relations… they were looking at Jim Crow America and they were producing propaganda showing how racist the United States was.” The “interest in African Americans as an oppressed people” and “also as oppressed workers” allowed the Soviet Union to sell its anti-capitalism narrative domestically, creating another layer to convince the Russian public they should consider America an enemy. [/quote]