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Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord
"Wrongfully?" No.
She did commit a crime in the country she was in. Might be a rather excessive punishment by our standards, and I have no doubt there were political motivations behind the sentence, but she was not innocent.
And we traded a guy responsible for god knows how much death, who will almost certainly go right back to his old trade. Madness.
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If we are going to trust the Russian legal system in one case, shouldn't we trust the Russian legal system in all cases?
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Whelan, a former marine who is a US, Irish, British and Canadian citizen, was detained at a Moscow hotel in December 2018 by Russian authorities who alleged he was involved in an intelligence operation. He was convicted and sentenced in June 2020 to 16 years in prison in a trial US officials denounced as unfair.
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Now I am extremely biased. I have zero trust in the Russian legal system when it comes to American citizens. I don't trust the authenticity of the video the Russians released as evidence against BG in the same way I do not trust that the evidence that Paul Whelan knowingly received a flash drive containing the names of Russian border guards. I don't think either one of them committed a crime under Russian law. Both are wrongfully detained IMO.
If the preference is for BG to remain in a Russian prison for the next nine years so Viktor Bout can remain in a US jail for the next seven years, well okay I guess. Even if that has remained the case, I don't that has any bearing on Whelan. I think it is pretty clear that Whelan is not on the trading block for anything less than a top level Russian spy at the very least.