President Biden’s eagerness for a prisoner swap with Russia will lead to clumsy diplomacy that could encourage other arrests of Americans for use as bait by bad actors seeking similar exchanges. It would be a bad deal even if the Kremlin ends up agreeing to take back a convicted Russian arms dealer as part of the trade for a basketball star.

The reported swap would release an arms dealer known as the “merchant of death” in exchange for the WNBA’s Brittney Griner and other wrongfully imprisoned Americans. As the Kremlin has not yet commented, the price for releasing the Americans could rise further. 

“In the coming days, I expect to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov for the first time since before the war began,” Secretary of State Blinken said yesterday. “I plan to raise an issue that’s a top priority for us: the release of Americans Paul Whelan and Brittney Griner.” 

First reported by CNN and later confirmed by the White House, the deal would return to America a WNBA star imprisoned in the winter for drug possession and a Canadian-American held on trumped-up espionage charges. In return, America would let go of a convicted arms dealer, Viktor Buot, sentenced to 25 years in an American federal prison. 

As a former Moscow correspondent for CNN, Jill Dougherty, said on the network this morning, prisoner swaps are best negotiated secretly and made public only once the exchanges are completed. In this case, Mr. Blinken spilled the beans in advance, and the National Security Council’s spokesman, John Kirby, went on television to defend the expected exchange.  

The Kremlin could well raise the price for releasing the Americans. After all, there are reasons to suspect that the arrest of Mr. Whelan, for one, was made specifically to dangle the former Marine as bait for a future prisoner exchange with America.

Ms. Griner’s profile is high enough to keep her name in American headlines for as long as she is imprisoned. She was caught at a Moscow airport with a small amount of hashish oil that she contends she did not even remember packing.

A former Olympian and current Phoenix Mercury center, who had at times reportedly refused to enter basketball courts while the “Star Spangled Banner” was playing, Ms. Griner arrived in Russia in February to play there during the WNBA off-season. 

Her wife, Cherelle Griner, has been making the television rounds demanding America do more to release the WNBA star. The case has led press headlines and television talk show chatter and has figured prominently in the State Department’s daily briefings. 

Meanwhile, as a Washington Post columnist, Manuel Roig-Franzia, reports today, another American languishing in a Russian jail for holding a small amount of physician-approved medical marijuana, Marc Fogel, has hardly become a household name. As yet, the name of that former lecturer on Cold War studies does not figure in the prisoner swap talks. The Russians could well hold him hostage for another swap.

In June, as concern about Ms. Griner’s plight gained steam, President Biden signed an executive order meant to “bring up a deterrence strategy that can raise the cost of hostage-taking and wrongful detention,” as an administration official said at the time. 

The uneven nature of the publicly proposed deal with Russia will do little to deter global hostage taking. Unlike in America, where family members of Ms. Griner and Messrs. Whelan and Fogel have beseeched the White House to act on their behalf, most Russians have hardly even heard of Buot. 

Yet, Buot’s decades-long run of shadowy business is well known in intelligence circles, and Russian spies are likely eager to bring him home before he starts singing like a canary. For now, Buot is keeping mum about suspected Kremlin backing for his illicit arms dealings. 

While Buot publicly denies that he sold arms to Al Qaeda, the career of the Tajik-born, multilingual former Russian military colonel reads like a Hollywood script. In the movie, Buot would star as the villain who sells the most lethal weapons to the highest bidders while feeding the world’s nastiest wars. 

After frequently changing addresses, Buot was finally caught in Thailand in a Drug Enforcement Agency sting operation. Posing as members of the Colombian anti-American terrorist organization FARC and sealing a fake arms deal, the DEA agents sealed his fate.

Buot was extradited to America, where he was convicted in New York’s Southern District court of charges that include conspiracy to kill Americans. The Kremlin called the conviction “baseless and biased.”

So, this prisoner exchange would entail the release of a notorious global criminal who has sold weapons to some of the world’s worst actors. Americans held on trumped-up charges or misdemeanors, including a celebrity athlete, would return home.

It is hard not to feel for the imprisoned Americans and their families, but the proposed swap is hardly a recipe for deterring Russia, China, or Iran from arresting Westerners to be used as bargaining chips. That is if the Russians agree to the deal, the existence of which they are yet to address publicly.