Brittney Griner Transferred to Russian Penal Colony

Russian and American officials have signaled that Ms. Griner’s fate may be decided during high-level negotiations over a potential exchange for Russian inmates held in the United States. But those talks could not begin in earnest until the legal process was completed, Russia officials said.

That is now the case, but for the moment, Ms. Griner’s whereabouts is likely to be shrouded in mystery.

President Biden said in a news conference on Wednesday that he hoped the negotiations could enter a new phase, now that the midterm elections were over. “My guess is, my hope is, that now that the election is over, that Mr. Putin will be able to discuss with us and be willing to talk more seriously about a prisoner exchange,” he said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Drawn-out transfers to a penal colony are a longtime practice in Russia, as they were in the Soviet Union before it. The process is 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 they are going, learning in which penal colony the sentence will be served only once a 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, “we ask for the public’s support in continuing to write letters and express their love and care for her.”

The W.N.B.A. players’ union, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, responded to the penal colony news by saying: “We stand with Brittney Griner and will continue to call on all Americans and the global sports community to do the same with even more vigilance. We are crushed that this scary, seemingly never-ending nightmare continues. The lack of clarity and transparency in the process compounds the pain.”

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