Comment Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who has been held in Russia since February, is being transferred to a Russian penal colony — a type of prison known for its brutal living conditions — her legal team said Wednesday. The 32-year-old was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on February 17 and accused of entering Russia with vapor cartridges containing cannabis oil, which is illegal in Russia. She pleaded guilty to carrying the cartridges, saying it was an “honest mistake”. She was sentenced to 9½ years in prison in August and a judge rejected her appeal late last month. “We have no information about her exact current location or final destination,” her lawyers Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov said in a statement. “According to standard Russian procedure, lawyers, as well as the US Embassy, should be notified upon her arrival at her destination,” a process they said usually takes up to two weeks. Russia has one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe, with nearly 520,000 prisoners held in prisons across the country, according to the Associated Press. Most of its facilities are known as penal colonies because inmates are required to perform labor during their sentence. The camps share many similarities with the gulags or forced labor camps used during the Soviet Union, and media investigations have highlighted alleged abuses of prisoners in penal colonies. Here’s what you need to know about Russian penal colonies Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was jailed after recovering from a poisoning attack, described the notorious No. 2 Penal Colony, where he was initially sent, as “our friendly concentration camp”. He accused the guards of denying him proper medical care or the opportunity to sleep and described inhumane surveillance. The White House condemned the decision to transfer Griner to a penal colony, with press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre saying that “every minute Brittney Griner has to endure in illegal detention in Russia is a minute too long.” “As the administration continues to work tirelessly to secure her release, the President has directed the administration to prevail on her Russian captors to improve her treatment and the conditions she may be forced to endure in a penal colony,” he said in her statement. Jean-Pierre added that the US government had made “a significant offer to resolve the current unacceptable and unjust detentions of American citizens” as Washington sought to negotiate a diplomatic solution to free Griner and Paul Whelan, an American former security adviser serving a 16-year sentence in Russia. Speaking on August 4, WNBA superstar Brittney Griner said she had no intention of violating Russian law after a small amount of cannabis oil was found in her bags. (Video: The Washington Post) But Russia blamed Washington on Tuesday for the lack of progress, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying: “We have not seen any desire from the United States to resolve people’s concrete problems.” In a statement Wednesday, Griner’s agent, Lindsay Colas, spoke of concerns for the basketball player’s health and well-being during “this very difficult phase of not knowing exactly where he is or how BG is doing.” “We are grateful for everyone’s support and hope that as we approach nine months of detention, BG and all wrongfully detained Americans will be released and come home to their families for the holidays,” Colas added.
