Gray walls, books and a monument to Lenin: A look inside the prison where Griner was held.


The detention facility outside Moscow where Brittney Griner, the American basketball star, is being held is a former orphanage that was converted a decade ago to house women detained pending trial and separately women serving their prison sentences .

Its artificially lit, gray-painted halls and sombre high walls befit its bureaucratic name: Correctional Colony No. 1 or IK-1.

It happened to thousands of Russian women, along with at least one other well-known foreigner: Naama Issachar, the Israeli-American who was arrested in April 2019 when Russian police said she found an ounce of marijuana in her luggage she was following a Moscow airport.

Ms Issachar was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for drug possession and smuggling before President Vladimir V Putin pardoned her 10 months after her initial arrest as she became a political pawn in the complex relationship between Russia and Israel.

In prison, Ms. Issachar said to her mother, “The clouds in Moscow are pretty.”

That was all she could see of the outside world.

Now it’s Ms Griner, also being held on drug charges, who is a pawn – American officials call her a Kremlin hostage – but the geopolitics at stake amid the war in Ukraine and Putin’s showdown with the West, is far more charged.

In a telephone interview from Israel, Ms Issachar’s mother, Yaffa Issachar, said her daughter cried when she heard about Ms Griner’s case and told her, “I know what she is going through now.”

The mother said Ms Issachar was treated relatively well by her cellmates, but she feared Ms Griner might be treated worse as a gay woman due to Russia’s conservative stance and restrictive laws on homosexuality.

Yaffa Issachar said her daughter was put through three Russian detention centers, including three months in the one where Ms Griner is expected to remain during her trial, which began on Friday. It is located in the village of Novoye Grishino, 80 km from the center of Moscow.

Russian authorities have not disclosed Ms Griner’s whereabouts. The New York Times was able to identify the prison from a photo posted online by a visitor, and the location was confirmed by a person familiar with the case. Ms Griner was held in the facility’s pre-trial detention facility, which includes a larger penal colony for women serving their sentences, with its own sewing factory and Russian Orthodox church.

Video footage of the prison available online shows high, gray walls, old prison bars, and a rusty Lenin monument in the courtyard. Ms Issachar, who was allowed to visit her daughter twice a month, also remembers the Lenin monument – along with the noise of barking prison dogs, which she said were being trained in the yard.

Every day at the facility looks pretty much the same for Ms. Griner, said Yekaterina Kalugina, a journalist and member of a public prison monitoring group who visited Ms. Griner in prison.

Inmates wake up, have breakfast in their cell—usually some basic food—then go for a walk in the prison’s yard, which is covered with a net. The rest of the day is taken up with reading books – Ms. Griner read Dostoyevsky in translation, for example – and television, although all channels are in Russian, Ms. Kalugina said.

The cell has a separate private washroom, she said, something of a first for Russian prisons. Inmates can order groceries online and use an in-cell refrigerator for groceries. You are only allowed to shower twice a week.

Ms Issachar said it would take up to four hours to complete the paperwork to enter the prison, with all the groceries she brought being carefully inspected – right down to the teabags, which had to be cut open and their contents emptied Plastic bag.

She could only see her daughter through glass and only speak to her over a phone. She said her daughter received weekly visits from a rabbi who would pass letters between them; According to prison regulations, the rabbi was allowed to be in the same room as the inmate.

Isolation for her daughter has been severe, Ms Ishaffar said. “Mom, the fall has started,” she recalled her daughter once telling her. “I see the leaves falling.”

Ms. Ishaffar suggested that Ms. Griner’s family find a priest who could visit them.

“There’s someone watching her,” she said, “but at least it’s someone she can talk to.”

Isabel Kerschner contributed reporting.