A Russian court on Tuesday upheld the American basketball star Brittney Griner’s sentence on drug smuggling charges, clearing the way for her to serve nine years in a penal colony and adding to pressure on the United States government to negotiate a deal for her release.
“We are very disappointed,” Ms. Griner’s attorneys said in a statement after the ruling by a three-judge panel of an appeals court near Moscow. “The verdict contains numerous defects and we hoped that the court of appeal would take them into consideration.”
The decision means Ms. Griner will begin serving her sentence soon, but it was not immediately clear if her legal options were exhausted. There are two higher courts above the appellate division, culminating in the Supreme Court, but Ms. Griner’s lawyers said they had not decided whether to take the case any further.
“We need to discuss this with our client,” the statement said. “We generally think that we must use all the available legal tools, especially given the harsh and unprecedented nature of her verdict.”
Higher courts in Russia also are not known for overturning verdicts, especially in a case involving foreign policy and the interests of the Kremlin.
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, denounced the ruling as “another sham judicial proceeding” and said in a statement that Ms. Griner “should be released immediately.”
The basketball star, 31, did not appear in court on Tuesday and participated in the proceedings via a video link from the detention center where she has been held since her arrest in February. Her lawyers said it could be a few months before she is moved to a penal colony.
Since she was arrested at a Moscow airport days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Ms. Griner’s fate has become entangled in the increasingly acrimonious relations between Moscow and Washington. As the Biden administration enforces harsh sanctions against President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as punishment for the invasion, American officials have accused Russia of using Ms. Griner and other U.S. citizens in Russian custody as bargaining chips.
In July, the Biden administration offered a prisoner swap involving Ms. Griner, but Russian officials have said it was premature to discuss a deal while her case was underway. One person briefed on the talks said at the time that the United States had proposed exchanging Ms. Griner — along with Paul Whelan, a former Marine held since December 2018 — for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year federal prison sentence for charges including conspiring to kill Americans.
President Biden and Mr. Putin are both expected to attend a summit of Group of 20 leaders next month in Indonesia, and Mr. Biden has said he would only speak with the Russian leader there if it was to discuss Ms. Griner’s case.
Bill Richardson, the former ambassador to the United Nations who has been unofficially negotiating with Russian officials as a private citizen, said in October that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan could be exchanged before the end of the year.
But Russia is a stickler for bureaucratic proceedings, so it is unlikely that negotiating any exchange can begin in earnest until the judicial process has run its course.
Ms. Griner, an all-star center with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was arrested on Feb. 17 in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where she had arrived from the United States. She was en route to Yekaterinburg, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, where she played for a women’s basketball team. Customs officials in Moscow said they had found two vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage and detained her.
Ms. Griner admitted her guilt in court but insisted that she had no intention to break the law, saying that the small amount of hashish oil appeared in her luggage because of negligence.
Since she was sentenced in August, her lawyers have argued that the nine-year prison term — near the 10-year maximum for such a conviction — was too harsh for a first-time offense and was politically motivated.
In an interview with “CBS Mornings” this month, Ms. Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, said that she had been able to speak to her only twice since she was detained and was increasingly worried about her. The most recent conversation, she said, was so troubling that she cried for two or three days afterward.
“It was the most disturbing phone call I’d ever experienced,” she told the interviewer, Gayle King, adding that her wife worried about being abandoned in Russia.
