Brittney Griner ‘trying to stay strong’ as she starts sentence in Russian penal colony

Brittney Griner, the American WNBA star incarcerated in Russia since February, has been moved to a penal colony in the Mordovia region to begin serving her nine-year sentence for drug possession.

“Brittney is doing as well as could be expected and trying to stay strong as she adapts to a new environment,” Griner’s lawyers said in a statement.

Mordovia is roughly 300 miles away from Moscow, where Griner was arrested in February by Russian authorities for carrying less than a gram of hashish oil in her luggage. Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine just days later; Griner was incarcerated.

The US in May classified Griner as “wrongfully detained” and opened negociations in July to get her and fellow incarcerated American Paul Whelan back in a prisoner exchange, but those talks have not to this point yielded a positive outcome.

Griner said during her brief trial that she did not intend to break the law, but plead guilty. She was later sentenced to nine years in prison. She appealed the sentenced, but had the appeal denied in October.

Griner had been incarcerated at a facility outside Moscow, but she was moved out of that detention centre earlier this month. Russian authorities had not provided an update on her whereabouts over the last two weeks, but her lawyers said on Thursday that she had been moved to the Female Penal Colony IK-2 in Yavas.

“We are aware of reports of her location, and in frequent contact with Ms Griner’s legal team,” a US State Department spokesperson told Reuters. “However, the Russian Federation has still failed to provide any official notification for such a move of a US citizen, which we strongly protest. The Embassy has continued to press for more information about her transfer and current location.”

Yavas is a sparcely populated town of fewer than 10,000 people as of the last census count that serves mainly as the home of several prison colonies. The conditions in Russian prison colonies are reportedly severe: prisoners are subjected to hours of forced labour each day and barely compensated, one former inmate at the Yavas colony told the BBC prisoners who do not work fast enough are beaten.

“Inmates work from 12 to 16 hours a day with lunch and toilet breaks,” Olga Podoplelova of the NGO Russia Behind Bars told the BBC. “Daily quotas are set very high, but one official salary is normally shared by several inmates. As a result, inmate workers only get a pay of several hundred roubles a month.”