Rancid food, freezing in isolation: Inside US basketball star’s Russian prison hell

WNBA star Brittney Griner will endure cruel circumstances inside a Russian penal colony — the place rancid meals, excessive isolation and tyrannical wardens await her, former Russian jail inmates, their kin and penitentiary specialists declare.

Former US Marine Trevor Rowdy Reed, who spent practically 1,000 days detained in Russia, was freed in April in change for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year jail sentence for conspiring to smuggle greater than $150 million of cocaine into New York, the New York Post stories.

Reed was accused of assaulting two Moscow law enforcement officials in August 2019 and spent 11 months in a pre-trial detention centre in Moscow till a Russian court docket meted out a nine-year sentence in 2020.

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He was later shipped 550km away to a penal colony within the distant Russian republic of Mordovia, the place he survived 9 agonising months till he was swapped this 12 months.

“You gotta understand, the labour camps in Mordovia, these are pre-Stalin-era prisons, these were literally referred to as gulags,” Trevor’s father, Joey Reed, informed The Post.

“And even though there’s a federal authority for prisons, each warden has wide leeway to do whatever they want until it makes someone angry or leads to bad press.”

Reed, 62, mentioned his son usually described a dour, medieval environment contained in the penal colony the place Trevor, now 31, lived in crude barracks constructed of brick and sheet steel.

He routinely curled up close to scorching water pipes or piled on additional garments throughout frigid nights within the desolate Mordovian plains, the place January temps common within the low teenagers. When guards threatened to forcibly disrobe his son, Trevor threatened them again, his father mentioned.

“They said they would take them off him and he said, ‘I will take you out trying,’” mentioned Reed, of Granbury, Texas. “But the guards never beat or abused him because they knew he was on the trading block.”

The defiant Marine vet wasn’t crushed by jailers for these daring stands, however he did lose about 50 kilos from his unimposing body because of the “horrible” meals, his father mentioned. The sparse grub consisted primarily of potato soup or some type of fish, which was sometimes crammed with “crunchy bones” — so foul that even the barracks’ stray cats didn’t eat it, Reed mentioned.

“That’s how bad it is,” he mentioned. “There was no real health value to the food.”

Trevor Reed, who refused to work contained in the penal colony, was tossed into solitary confinement for lengthy stretches as much as 28 days, his father mentioned.

“They were trying to break my son,” Reed mentioned. “The main reason he resisted was because he was angry.”

The determined veteran went on two starvation strikes to protest being barred from contacting his kin hundreds of kilometres away and never receiving correct medical care, his father mentioned.

“He would only drink water, but could only last about four or five days each time because he was already so malnourished,” Reed mentioned. “He figured if he died of starvation, it would be an international incident.”

Now Trevor, who declined to be interviewed, has been again within the US for about eight months, recuperating from his nightmarish stint in Russia. Reed mentioned his son is “doing well.”

“He’s going to return to college,” Joey mentioned. “He’s got a lot of options on the table.” And regardless of the ordeal, “Trevor speaks fluent Russian now,” his father added, which he first discovered from a Russian lady he dated earlier than being arrested — and perfected behind these jail partitions.

Other inmates in Russian prisons or penal colonies, in the meantime, haven’t been as lucky. Many, as an example, are subjected to systemic torture, which may typically culminate in loss of life or suicide. The services are rife with human rights violations which are usually “life-threatening,” in response to a State Department report.

“Overcrowding, abuse by guards and inmates, limited access to health care, food shortages, and inadequate sanitation were common in prisons, penal colonies, and other detention facilities,” the 2021 evaluation discovered.

Even extra dire, some penal colony inmates are restricted to simply six telephone calls per 12 months, in response to Daniel Balson, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia.

“Within Europe, the Russian prison system has been subjected to the highest number of complaints to human rights monitors,” Balson informed The Post. “It really stands apart among cruel, inhumane and degrading practices.”

Inmates like Griner, who will serve a nine-year sentence for drug smuggling and possession following her failed attraction, are habitually despatched to extraordinarily secluded areas by way of van or prepare on journeys lasting so long as weeks. The clueless captives are usually denied entry to primary requirements like meals, water or bedding in the course of the terrifying journeys, Balson mentioned.

“They don’t know where they are and they don’t know where they’re going — and often aren’t told until their arrival,” Balson mentioned. “Prisoners are being functionally disappeared for days or weeks in the prison system.”

Without White House intervention or a lowered sentence, Griner, 32, will end her penal colony stretch in summer time 2031 — just a few months shy of her forty first birthday. But the psychological torment of the two-time Olympian’s draconian detention might proceed years and even a long time later, one former American prisoner mentioned.

“It took me a long time to adjust to normal society,” Marvin Makinen, 83, of Chicago, informed The Post. “It still affects me.”

Makinen, then 21, was arrested within the Soviet Union on espionage costs in July 1961. He was later sentenced to eight years by a closed army tribunal. He spent two years in maximum-security Vladimir Prison — Russia’s largest, which was established by Empress Catherine II in 1783 — which included spans in solitary confinement, earlier than being transferred to a labour camp in what’s now Mordovia.

“It becomes very depressing, there’s a lot of mental anguish,” Makinen mentioned. “It’s important for your mental health to have some kind of activity to keep your mind active, otherwise you’re just sitting around stewing.”

Makinen spent 4 months on the labour camp, the place he labored as a mason. During his 28 months in captivity, he misplaced practically 55 kilos from his slim construct. He was in the end freed in 1963 together with Polish American Jesuit priest Walter Ciszek in change for 2 Soviet spies.

Makinen mentioned US Embassy officers ought to push to go to Griner as steadily as potential so jailers received’t permit her situation to deteriorate.

“And I hope that they allow her communication, written communication with her family to keep up her mental health,” mentioned Makinen, now a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology on the University of Chicago. “I was limited to one letter a month.”

This story appeared within the NY Post and has been reproduced with permission.