WNBA Star Brittney Griner released from prison on Dec. 8. The WNBA Star, was put in Russian Prison for being found guilty in August of trying to smuggle illegal narcotics into Russia and was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony. She had been in detainment 10 months prior to the sentence.

The exchange of WNBA star Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout is not a sign of improvements in the relations between Russia and the United States, a Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. Bout, a convicted arms dealer, was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US on charges of conspiring to kill Americans. Another American, Paul Whelan, remains in Russian custody. Whelan, a former marine, was detained at a Moscow hotel in December 2018 by Russian authorities who accused him of being 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. A senior in the Biden Administration said, “We have shown an openness to talk about that which is actually available to us and gotten only in response to a demand for something not available to us.”