Russia’s International Ministry stated on Wednesday that basketball megastar Brittney Griner, lately on trial in Russia on drug smuggling fees, may just attraction her sentence or ask for clemency as soon as the courtroom delivers its verdict.

“The courtroom should first ship its verdict, however nobody is preventing Brittney Griner from applying the attraction process and in addition from asking for clemency,” Aleksei Zaitsev, a ministry spokesman, instructed journalists at a information briefing in Moscow.

Mr. Zaitsev stated that Ms. Griner’s “severe offense has been supported by means of indeniable proof” and that “makes an attempt to offer her case as even though the American girl used to be illegally detained don’t get up to grievance.”

Ms. Griner, 31, used to be detained on Feb. 17 after she used to be accused of getting cannabis oil in her baggage at an airport close to Moscow, the place she had traveled to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg, a Russian skilled girls’s basketball group.

The U.S. executive has categorised Ms. Griner as “wrongfully detained,” that means that it believes the costs in opposition to her are falsified — in all probability meant to force Washington over the battle in Ukraine.

If she is convicted, she faces as much as 10 years in a Russian penal colony. On Monday, she despatched a handwritten letter to President Biden asking him to not “fail to remember about” her and different American detainees.