US Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly revealed for the first time Thursday that the United States has put forward a “serious proposal” to secure wrongfully detained Paul Whelan’s release from Russia.
US officials have long stressed their commitment to bringing home Whelan, who has been detained in Russia since 2018, but the public disclosure that a deal is on the table marks a notable development in those efforts.
In a “brief engagement” with Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting Thursday, Blinken said he pressed the Russian foreign minister on Whelan’s detention and the offer.
“The United States has put forward a serious proposal. Moscow should accept it,” Blinken said at a news conference following the meeting with Lavrov.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Thursday that this “was not a proposal that the Russians heard for the first time today.”
Price declined to give details on that proposal, but said it was one “that we have conveyed to them consistently in the past.”
“We have conveyed in some detail, in all of the necessary detail to the Russian Federation, the proposal that we have put on the table,” Price said at a department briefing. “We have gone about this relentlessly, we have gone about this creatively, seeking to do everything we can to see the release of Paul Whelan.”
Price would not say whether the Russian government had engaged with that proposal.
Whelan was arrested in Moscow in December 2018 on espionage charges he has vehemently denied. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in June 2020.
The United States was unable to secure his freedom from Russia in a prisoner swap that brought home another detained American – Brittney Griner – in December. Multiple US officials said following Griner’s release…
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