The detention facility simply outdoors Moscow the place Brittney Griner, the American basketball star, has been held is a former orphanage rebuilt a decade in the past to accommodate girls jailed earlier than trial and, individually, girls serving their jail sentences.
Its artificially lit, grey painted halls and grim tall partitions befit its bureaucratic identify: Correctional Colony No. 1, or IK-1.
Thousands of Russian girls have handed by means of it, together with at the very least one different well-known foreigner: Naama Issachar, the Israeli-American arrested in April 2019 when the Russian police mentioned they’d discovered a 3rd of an oz of marijuana in her baggage as she was connecting at a Moscow airport.
Ms. Issachar was sentenced to seven and a half years in jail on drug possession and smuggling costs earlier than President Vladimir V. Putin pardoned her, 10 months after she was first arrested, as she grew to become a political pawn in the complicated relationship between Russia and Israel.
In jail, Ms. Issachar advised her mom: “The clouds in Moscow are pretty.”
It was all she might see of the outdoors world.
Now it’s Ms. Griner, additionally held on drug costs, who’s a pawn — American officers name her a hostage of the Kremlin — however the geopolitics at stake, amid the struggle in Ukraine and Mr. Putin’s showdown with the West, are much more fraught.
In a phone interview from Israel, Ms. Issachar’s mom, Yaffa Issachar, mentioned that her daughter had cried when she heard about Ms. Griner’s case, telling her: “I know what she’s going through now.”
The mom mentioned that Ms. Issachar had been handled comparatively nicely by her cellmates, however that she feared that Ms. Griner, as a homosexual lady, could possibly be handled worse due to Russia’s conservative attitudes and restrictive legal guidelines surrounding homosexuality.
Yaffa Issachar mentioned her daughter had been moved by means of three Russian detention amenities, together with three months in the one the place Ms. Griner is predicted to remain by means of the length of her trial, which began on Friday. It is in the village of Novoye Grishino, a 50-mile drive from central Moscow.
The Russian authorities haven’t disclosed Ms. Griner’s whereabouts. The New York Times was capable of establish the jail from {a photograph} revealed on-line by a customer, and the location was confirmed by an individual conversant in the case. Ms. Griner has been held in the pretrial detention middle of the facility, which additionally features a bigger penal colony for girls serving out their sentences, with its personal stitching manufacturing facility and Russian Orthodox church.
Video footage of the jail accessible on-line exhibits tall, grey partitions, previous jail bars and a rusty monument to Lenin in the courtyard. Ms. Issachar, who was allowed to go to her daughter twice a month, additionally remembers the Lenin monument — together with the din of barking jail canines that, she mentioned, have been being skilled in the yard.
For Ms. Griner, each day in the facility appears just about the similar, mentioned Yekaterina Kalugina, a journalist and member of a public jail monitoring group who has visited Ms. Griner in the jail.
What to Know About Brittney Griner’s Detention in Russia
The inmates get up, have breakfast of their cell — normally some fundamental meals — after which go for a stroll in the jail’s courtyard, which is roofed by a internet. The remainder of the day is stuffed with studying books — Ms. Griner has been studying Dostoyevsky in translation, for example — and watching tv, although all of the channels are in Russian, Ms. Kalugina mentioned.
The cell has a separate non-public washroom, she mentioned, one thing of a novelty for Russian prisons. Inmates can order meals on-line and use a fridge in the cell for groceries. They are allowed to take a bathe solely twice per week.
Ms. Issachar mentioned it will take so long as 4 hours to finish the paperwork to enter the jail, with all of the meals she was bringing in painstakingly inspected — all the way down to the tea luggage, which needed to be minimize open, their contents emptied right into a plastic bag.
She might see her daughter solely by means of glass, and discuss to her solely by means of a phone. She mentioned that her daughter had been allowed weekly visits by a rabbi, who would cross letters between them; underneath jail laws, the rabbi was allowed to be in the similar room as the inmate.
The isolation for her daughter was extreme, Ms. Ishaffar mentioned. “Mommy, the fall started,” she recalled her daughter telling her at one level. “I see the leaves coming down.”
Ms. Ishaffar prompt that Ms. Griner’s household discover a priest who might go to her.
“There is somebody watching them,” she mentioned, “but at least it’s a human she can talk to.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
