MOSCOW, Russia (Transatlantic Today) – The US ramped up its quest for consular access to Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who is being held in Russia on drug charges, on Friday, after a representative of a Russian state-run prison monitoring organization indicated she was doing well behind bars.
Ekaterina Kalugina informed The Associated Press early Friday that she met Griner at the pretrial detention center outside of Moscow on Monday and spoke with her with the help of a fellow inmate who knows Russian and English and functioned as a translator.
Kalugina is a member of the Russian public monitoring commission, which visits prisons in that region. These commissions, which operate across the nation, portray themselves as self-governing, although they rarely question Russian authorities on critical matters.
Griner’s attorneys have been paying her regular visits and sending her care packages with personal things and food, but she has yet to meet with a US consul, according to Kalugina.
The Department Of State demanded access to Griner, who competes as a professional basketball player in Russia during the offseason.
Griner was arrested after landing at a Moscow airport in mid-February, according to reports, after Russian officials said an inspection of her luggage uncovered vape cartridges purportedly containing cannabis-derived oil, a crime punishable by up to ten years in jail.
The Russian state news service Tass announced on Thursday that Griner’s pretrial custody had been prolonged until May 19.
Griner raised no complaints regarding her condition in the prison, according to Kalugina, and stated she was given one hour each day to spend in a training yard.
According to ABC NEWS, Griner’s team of lawyers has been discreetly pursuing her freedom and has refused to talk about the issue since her detention was publicly disclosed earlier this month.
A small fraction of the hundreds and thousands of American citizens arrested and detained in foreign prisons are classified by the US government as wrongfully detained, a category that gives their cases added federal attention and places them under the supervision of the State Department’s Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Griner’s case has not yet been categorized as such by the US authorities.