BREAKING: US has traded Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout (Merchant of Death) for Brittney Griner

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Despicable.

Agreed.  I'm sure Ukraine and most of the rest of Russia's neighbors will be delighted that the Merchant of Death is free.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Joke Sullivan got dictated to.

https://twitter.com/nickschifrin/status/1600868026471284739

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Everyone spent the last year demanding that Biden free Brittney Griner and literally demanding he make this exact deal once the media started reporting it as a possibility.

Now that he's actually done it, there's nothing to be gained from continuing to pretend to care about Brittney Griner.  So all the Biden haters have switched overnight to talking about what a lopsided deal it is and how horrible it is that Biden set free the notorious Viktor Bout (a guy you'd never heard of before all this).

Meanwhile all the Do-Something-ers will do what they always do -- completely memory-hole this entire incident now that Biden has actually achieved success, and simply move on to the next "crisis" that offers proof of Biden's ineptitude.

What? I never demanded for a second that Biden make this trade. This is the most r******* trade I’ve ever seen in my life.

Same.  Man the ability of Joke Sullivan and Blinken to negotiate is pathetic.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

My gut reaction was that this was a bad deal, but this article by a well-respected national security journalist brought an interesting perspective:

So why even consider the potential offer? First, Bout is a spent force who will be out of jail in a few years anyway. His business depended on personal relationships and trust among the parties. After being out of the business for more than a decade, Bout has neither of those left in the shadowy world in which he once operated. Second, Bout needed access to a global network stretching from Afghanistan to Europe, Africa and South America. That network has morphed through several generations of new actors, markets and gatekeepers. Bout has no currency in that world now.

Finally, Bout depended in the early years on the gross negligence of the former Soviet states to allow him to simply fly out aircraft and weapons in a spree of de facto privatization of one of the world’s most advanced arsenals. In his later years, he was reined in by the Russian state under Putin, no longer able to freelance at will and without unfettered access to massive caches of weapons. It is unlikely he would have any freedom of movement in the weapons trade unless he was in the direct service of the Russian intelligence services, and now he is burned beyond the ability to be useful in any significant capacity.

I'm sure Ukrainians would have been happy to let the Merchant of Death cool his heels in our prison for a few more years.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Good to see this innocent woman coming home.  Yes, innocent, because her "crime" is BS.

And yes it came at a heavy price, but that's unfortunately the way it goes when you are forced to negotiate with terrorists.

Who exactly was forcing us to negotiate?

The moral imperative of not leaving an innocent American citizen in some dungeon in Mordor.


(It's bizarre that your silly question with such an obvious answer got so many recommends, but here we are.)

There are other moral imperatives, like the security risk of letting a major arms dealer go, undoing years of hard work by other Americans who spent time away from their families and put their lives on the line, and the invitation for any government to imprison American civilians to get their bad guys out of American prisons.

I'll direct your attention back to my first post, in which I acknowledged the high price that often comes with negotiating with terrorists.

Which is why Horus suggested he not do so and was certainly not forced to do so.