Brittney Griner Is Being Moved to a Russian Penal Colony, Her Lawyers Say

U.S. officials met with her last week, and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said she was doing “as well as can be expected under the circumstances.” On Wednesday, Ms. Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the president had directed his administration to “prevail on her Russian captors to improve her treatment and the conditions she may be forced to endure in a penal colony.”

She added that the U.S. government was “unwavering in its commitment to its work on behalf of Brittney and other Americans detained in Russia,” including Paul Whelan, a former Marine who in 2020 was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian prison on espionage charges.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken echoed those sentiments in a statement and called Ms. Griner’s transfer to a remote penal colony “another injustice layered on her ongoing unjust and wrongful detention.”

A drawn-out transfer to a penal colony from a Russian jail, where detainees are kept during their trials and for some time afterward, is a longtime practice in the Soviet and Russian systems, known as staging. Prisoners are typically not allowed to communicate with the outside world for a week or two while they are moved, and lawyers and family members do not know where the inmates are going — learning which penal colony the sentence will be served in only once the prisoner arrives.

“As we work through this very difficult phase of not knowing exactly where B.G. is or how she is doing,” Lindsay Kagawa Colas, Ms. Griner’s agent, said in a statement, using her client’s initials, “we ask for the public’s support in continuing to write letters and express their love and care for her.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/europe/brittney-griner-russia-penal-colony.html