A hashtag won't free Brittney Griner. We'll pay a terrible price to bring her home

Brittney Griner will likely be free one day, but not because her sisters in the WNBA launched a website, a petition and apparel that say, “We Are BG.”

She won’t come home because LeBron James urged us all on Twitter “to come together and help do whatever we possibly can to bring BG home quickly and safely!!”

That’s very American. And very can-do. I admire the spirit.

But “No,” as Carson Wells told Llewelyn Moss in the 2007 film “No Country for Old Men.”

“You don’t understand.”

In the movie the line means Llewelyn Moss, a very average blue-collar Texan, doesn’t understand the psychopathic killer he’s dealing with.

This is the true nature of Vladimir Putin

If the once very real Alexander Litvinenko could speak from the grave, he’d tell us who we are dealing with.

Litvinenko was a Russian dissident in exile in London who had crossed Vladimir Putin. He had formerly served with Putin as an officer in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency of the KGB that spied on, imprisoned and murdered Russians who stepped out of line in the old Soviet Union.

Another view: Will Russians do the smart thing and free Brittney Griner?

Litvinenko wrote a book accusing Putin of orchestrating a false flag operation that ultimately put Putin in power in post-Cold War Russia. According to the accusation, the FSB used high explosives to blow up apartment blocks in three Russian cities in 1999, killing some 300 Russian citizens.

As now-deceased U.S. Sen. John McCain would explain, “It was during Mr. Putin’s tenure as Prime Minister in 1999 that he launched the Second Chechen War following the Moscow apartment bombings. There remain credible allegations that Russia’s FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks.

“Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000 by pointing a finger at the Chechens for committing these crimes, launching a new military campaign in Chechnya, and riding a frenzy of public anger into office.”

Ukrained invasion proves his savagery

Litvinenko also accused Putin of ordering the 2006 assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot four times point blank in the elevator at her Moscow apartment complex.

The facts of Politkovskaya’s murder and the apartment-building bombings remain disputed, but there was no question Litvinenko had angered powerful people. A hit squad from Russia came to London and poisoned a pot of tea with a lethal dose of polonium-210. Litvinenko drank the tea at a hotel bar in London.

Soon he would die an excruciatingly painful death, the radionuclide destroying his soft tissue from within. A British inquiry would conclude that Putin had probably ordered the hit and the Russian hit team had spread radioactive contamination in airplanes and buildings in the process.

If there were any lingering dispute about the kind of man Vladimir Putin is, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has removed all doubt. Russian missiles and bombs have been leveling entire cities, erasing them from the map. Russian soldiers have been killing bound and tied civilians with bullets to the head and dumping their bodies into mass graves.

And if the world interferes too deeply with his “special military operation,” he has vowed nuclear retaliation.

No T-shirt campaign will free Brittney Griner

That brings us back to Brittney Griner, who languishes in a jail cell in Russia, taken prisoner after Russian federal authorities say they found hashish oil for vaping in her luggage at a Moscow airport. (Given Russia's track record, we should not believe anything Russian authorities allege about her.)

Griner is likely to eventually go free precisely because Vladimir Putin is so cold-blooded. She is not a human being to him in any sense that we can understand. There will be no shaming the Russian president with public pressure and T-shirt slogans. The protesters, I'm sure, know this.

Griner will go free when the United States government is willing to pay the going rate for American hostages -- when we exchange a Russian prisoner for her the way we traded one for American hostage Trevor Reed.

Reed was imprisoned after Russian authorities accused him of assaulting police officers while he was drunk.

'There is no justice in Russia,' former prisoner said

On Monday, Reed gave a chilling interview to CNN about the fresh hell he confronted in a Russian prison.

“There is no justice in Russia. Brittney and (fellow U.S. detainee) Paul (Whelan) will not receive justice in Russia. They’re not going to receive a fair trial, they will not receive a fair investigation. They will be there as hostages until the United States gets them out.”

The food, the medical care, the cell, itself, were “medieval,” he said. “Every day that you’re in prison there, it’s like you’re waking up to a nightmare.”

Whelan said he grew so ill he was coughing up blood and lost 45 pounds. He described to CNN’s Jake Tapper the psychiatric treatment facility where he found himself:

“There was blood all over the wall there – where prisoners had killed themselves, or killed other prisoners, or attempted to do that. 

“The toilet’s just a hole in the floor. And there’s, you know, crap everywhere, all over the floor, on the walls. There’s people in there also that walk around that look like zombies.”

There's a reason Biden doesn't want to pay

Brittney Griner will go free when President Joe Biden finally and reluctantly pays the ransom to set her free. In the case of Trevor Reed, it was exchanging for him a Russian prisoner convicted of conspiring to import $100 million of cocaine into the United States.

When Reed was finally safe, Biden said something cryptic. “The negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly.”

What Biden likely meant was that the United States does not like to do these prisoner exchanges, because when we do them, we almost certainly guarantee that more Americans somewhere in the world will be taken hostage.

Because we just proved it works.

The campaign for Brittney Griner is really about pushing Joe Biden to do what is necessary to bring Griner home. His cryptic comment tells us he will do so with the full understanding that it comes at a very high price.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Free Brittney Griner? Not until Biden pays a terrible price