Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday during a trip to Uzbekistan that he would propose a date for a meeting.

However, a phone call could only be made from his office in Moscow - it would be the first with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February.

Sofia Dreisbach

North American political correspondent based in Washington.

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And the content of the conversation would also be of great importance.

It's about the proposal for an unequal prisoner exchange that Blinken made public this week.

According to Blinken, the American government is ready to exchange the Americans imprisoned in Moscow, the basketball player Brittney Griner and the former Marine Paul Whelan, for the Russian Viktor Bout.

Griner imported two e-cigarette cartridges with 0.252 and 0.45 grams of cannabis oil to Russia in February.

If convicted of drug possession and smuggling, she faces up to ten years in prison.

Whelan was arrested in 2018 for alleged espionage and sentenced to 16 years in camp in 2020.

In both cases, Washington refers to the politically motivated Russian judiciary.

350,000 people have signed the petition for his release

Viktor Bout, on the other hand, has a history of selling weapons to terrorists, rebels and militant groups around the world.

In 2011, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the United States for selling guns to people who wanted to kill Americans.

The verdict, in turn, criticized Moscow as not legal.

The American government has recently come under increasing pressure, especially in the case of the well-known basketball player Griner.

Her wife and family had repeatedly publicly urged the government to take action;

Nearly 350,000 people have signed a petition urging President Joe Biden to do "whatever it takes" for Griner's release.

A larger-than-life portrait of the 31-year-old woman has been emblazoned on a house wall in Washington's Georgetown district since last week, along with the likenesses of 17 other Americans who are imprisoned abroad.

The project initiated the "Bring our families home" campaign, which advocates the immediate release of the prisoners.

America has long opposed prisoner exchanges

Biden spoke to Griner's wife on the phone in early July after the basketball player sent him a handwritten letter from prison asking him "not to forget her and the other American detainees."

At that time, the White House had said it was "doing everything possible" to get Griner released - a formulation that National Security Council spokesman John Kirby repeated verbatim on Thursday.

However, they do not want to make any further details public so as not to jeopardize the negotiations.

It is unusual for such plans to be made public before an agreement has been reached.

Especially since Lavrov said on Friday that he learned about it from the media.

A sign of the pressure Biden is under?

Such an exchange harbors risks for the American government, which for a long time was fundamentally opposed to prisoner exchanges.

Critics say it makes Americans a target abroad.

In this case in particular, they say, they are giving Vladimir Putin a victory in the middle of a war -- and releasing a man who may again be endangering American lives.

Conversely, many consider it inhuman if the government does not do everything possible to get American citizens out of captivity abroad.

Whelan's twin brother David called the release of the now 55-year-old Bouts a "tough decision" on Fox News on Thursday.

However, he supports her.

Shira Scheindlin, the American judge who sentenced Bout, also approves of the possible exchange.

Bout has already eaten a crucial part of his sentence.

In her opinion, he was a businessman, "not a terrorist".