Can Diplomacy Save Brittney Griner?

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at Brittney Griner’s uncertain fate, Israel’s deadly raid in Nablus, and Qatar’s human rights abuses. 

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American basketball star Brittney Griner is set to serve a nine-year prison sentence in a Russian penal colony after a court shot down her appeal on Tuesday, in a ruling that U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan condemned as “another sham judicial proceeding.”

While expected, Griner now faces a harrowing future in a penal colony—one of many Russian prisons that can be traced back to gulags and force prisoners to work. News reports, inmate testimonies, and government investigations describe a harsh system in which torture, physical attacks, and sexual violence are rampant. 

Griner’s fate now lies in the hands of U.S. diplomats, who have spent months struggling to negotiate her release as U.S.-Russia relations rapidly deteriorate over the war in Ukraine. In July, the Biden administration proposed a prisoner swap—releasing Viktor Bout, an arms dealer, in exchange for the freedom of Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan—although the Kremlin insisted on waiting for her court case to conclude. 

As Russian President Vladimir Putin wields Griner’s detention as political leverage, the Biden administration is facing a “really difficult set of competing priorities,” said Danielle Gilbert, a hostage diplomacy expert at Dartmouth College. 

“They want to bring home Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned,” she said. “But they also don’t want to reward this kind of bad behavior or give anything up to Vladimir Putin at a time that he’s engaged in a brutal and unjust war in Ukraine, nor do they want to incentivize future arrests of this sort.”

Griner, who turned 32 last week, has now been detained since Feb. 17, just before Russia invaded Ukraine. She had been arrested for carrying under a gram of hashish oil; Moscow convicted her of drug smuggling. In May, Washington said Griner had been “wrongfully detained.”

U.S. officials are set to continue talks for Griner’s release, although past prisoner swaps suggest that it could take years for progress to be made. Whelan himself has been held in Russia since 2018. 

“When we look at cases of Americans who have recently come home from this sort of unjust captivity abroad, it’s often two, three, four years that they are imprisoned before the negotiations are concluded,” Gilbert said.

Until then, Griner faces a deeply uncertain future. 

“She is not yet absolutely convinced that America will be able to take her home,” Alexandr Boykov, one of Griner’s lawyers, told the New York Times earlier in October. “She is very worried about what the price of that will be, and she is afraid that she will have to serve the whole sentence here in Russia.”

Israel’s deadly raid. At least five Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces carried out a raid against a group called the Lions’ Den in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday. Israeli authorities have accused the organization of launching a spate of attacks. The leader of the Lions’ Den, Wadie al-Houh, was killed. 

Qatar’s human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch has recorded six cases in which Qatari authorities have arbitrarily detained and beaten LGBT people—as well as five cases of sexual harassment against LGBT people—from 2019 to 2022. In several cases, officials forced transgender women to participate in conversion therapy, the organization said. 

“While Qatar prepares to host the World Cup, security forces are detaining and abusing LGBT people simply for who they are, apparently confident that the security force abuses will go unreported and unchecked,” said Rasha Younes, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Have questions about the Brazilian election campaign, runoff results, or the future of Brazil generally? Join Rio de Janeiro-based journalist and author of Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief, Catherine Osborn, the day after the runoff vote for a special live chat on Monday, Oct. 31, at 1 p.m. EDT. Foreign Policy subscribers can submit their questions ahead of time here.  

Myanmar’s concert attack. At least 80 people have reportedly died after Myanmar’s military launched a deadly airstrike at an outdoor concert organized by a branch of the Kachin, one of the country’s major ethnic groups. The concert was commemorating the establishment of the Kachin Independence Organization, which has opposed and clashed with Myanmar’s military junta. 

Flooding in South Sudan. Extreme flooding has displaced and upended the livelihoods of more than 2 million people in South Sudan this year. Eight of the country’s 10 states are now experiencing flooding, officials said, while almost 65 percent of its people suffer from food insecurity. 

An Iranian man who reportedly refused to shower or bathe for decades—and was known as the “world’s dirtiest man”—passed away over the weekend, just months after bathing himself for the first time. He was 94 years old, the Guardian reported. He reportedly thought that he would become sick after washing.