Brittney Griner is finally home. On Thursday, the WNBA star landed in the United Arab Emirates, ending her 294 days in Russian captivity. There, on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi, the United States and Russia carried out a high-profile prisoner exchange, trading Griner for a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in the United States. Viktor Bout, nicknamed “the merchant of death,” was released after serving 12 years of a 25-year sentence for supporting terrorism and conspiring to kill Americans.

Griner’s painful, 10-month ordeal highlights the growing trend of state-led hostage-taking. Here are five things we’ve learned from Griner’s detention.

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Griner was a hostage

Griner was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced through the Russian criminal justice system. But she was never a normal prisoner, nor was her trial fair. In May, the State Department designated Griner as “wrongfully detained,” indicating that the U.S. government considered her treatment illegitimate. The designation also marked the official government efforts to bring her home.

This is an example of hostage diplomacy: when a government, like Russia’s, uses its criminal justice system to take foreigners hostage. Two elements clue us in to Griner’s “hostage” status.

First, the charges were exaggerated, perhaps even by Russia’s own standards. Griner was convicted of international drug smuggling, though she was found with 0.7 grams of cannabis oil — the weight of a raisin — in her luggage. While Russia has notoriously strict drug laws, Griner’s sentence of 9½ years of hard labor in a penal colony fell outside the norm of recent cases.

Second and crucially, Griner was held for leverage. In this way, she met the definition of a hostage in international law. The 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages defines hostage taking as “detain[ing] and threaten[ing] to … continue to detain another person” to “compel a third party, namely, a State,” to do something “as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage.” The Russian government made clear in both official and unofficial channels that Griner would be held until Bout was released; her detention was conditional on concessions.Thus, although officially a “wrongful detainee,” Griner was held hostage. My own thinking on this subject has evolved, as hostage-taking has shifted from a tactic used by terrorist groups to one used by authoritarian states. While most Americans arrested abroad should not be considered hostages, any held for leverage would meet that definition.