WNBA star Brittney Griner moved to Russian penal colony to serve sentence

Nov. 17 (UPI) -- WNBA star Brittney Griner has been moved to a Russian penal colony to serve out her sentence after she was detained in a Moscow airport in February and convicted of smuggling cannabis oil into the country just days before the invasion of Ukraine.

Griner, the 32-year-old center for the Phoenix Mercury, was found guilty in August and sentenced to nine years in prison.

She had been held in a pretrial detention center in Iksha, but has now been transferred to the IK-2 female penal colony in the town of Yavas, her lawyers said in a statement to CNN and The New York Times.

"Brittney is doing as well as could be expected and trying to stay strong as she adapts to a new environment," Griner's lawyers, Maria Blagovolina and Aleksandr Boikov, said in the statement.

"Considering that this is a very challenging period for her, there will be no further comments from us."

Russia's penal colonies are labor camps often at former Soviet gulag prison sites in which inmates are kept in crowded group barracks rather than cells and forced to work, according to ABC News. The IK-2 penal colony can hold up to 820 inmates.

Prisoners experience harsh conditions, including the ability to shower only once or twice a week, even when temperatures fall below freezing outside. Most prisons in Russia are penal colonies.

A human rights report from the U.S. State Department in 2021 found that political prisoners in Russia are often placed in harsh conditions where they can be subjected to "solitary confinement or punitive stays in psychiatric units."

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law to conscript Russian citizens with criminal records into the military as the country mobilizes troops amid the war in Ukraine.