The WNBA star, whose nine-year prison sentence was upheld Tuesday, has been living in a detention center near Moscow since her arrest on Feb. 17
As Brittney Griner went through a detainment, and then a lengthy trial and now an appeal hearing, the WNBA star has been held in a detention center near Moscow, where she was arrested on Feb. 17.
With the news Tuesday morning that her appeal for a reduced sentence was rejected, she now faces down her unprecedented nine-year sentence and continued life as a Russian prisoner.
Before her appeal hearing, Griner’s attorneys talked to PEOPLE about what the Phoenix Mercury star’s daily life is like inside her Russian prison cell.
The 32-year-old Griner wakes up at 7 a.m. daily, “as everybody” in her Russian detention center does, her lawyer, Alexander Boykov, from the Moscow Legal Center, tells PEOPLE.
“They go to sleep around 10 p.m. and that’s when the lights turn off and the television’s turned off.”
Griner is “not allowed to sleep” outside of the prison’s allotted hours, “because those are the jail rules,” her attorney explains. “Of course, you can lay down for a bit, but mostly they talk with” other inmates during daily free time.
Griner and the prisoners “watch television, they prepare themselves food, they read, and that’s basically it,” says Boykov.
The athlete’s daily routine includes eating breakfast and “a one-hour walk in the yard,” which mostly happens “in the first part of the day.”
For the Phoenix Mercury star, “every day is the same,” says Boykov, who, along with her lawyer Maria Blagovolina, a partner at Rybalkin Gortsunyan Dyakin and Partners, tries to visit his client twice a week to spend “a couple hours talking.”
As an athlete, Griner is accustomed to maintaining exceptional physical endurance. However, Boykov says that even a “smaller person would have a hard time exercising” in a cell the size of Griner’s.
“There’s no gym, no runway, no basketball court,” Boykov says. Blagovolina adds that there isn’t “much” exercise equipment available to Griner, but, “She goes for a walk” and “she does some exercises.”
Blagovolina believes her client “feels okay physically” despite the limited resources, however.
Now that Griner is no longer awaiting a court date after her failed appeal, she will likely be moved from the detention center to a penal colony.
At the detention center, the spaces are cramped and there’s only a small exercise yard, but there is a benefit to staying there — each day counts as two towards a prison sentence.
Inside the colony, there’s more space and Griner would have to work eight hours a day. For most prisoners, this means sewing, cleaning, cooking and serving food, but, because of her career as a WNBA player, Griner can see about coaching women’s basketball.
There’s a precedent for such an arrangement — Russian soccer players Alexander Kokorin and Pavel Mamayev coached inmates while they served time in one of the colonies.
Ivan Melnikov, the vice president of the Russian Department of the International Human Rights Defense Committee who observed Griner and her living conditions in March, previously told PEOPLE that it’s up to the prison governor to decide if Griner can coach.
“I hope that she will be sent to a colony with a lenient governor who allows her to coach basketball in the daytime rather than being a seamstress,” he said.
“Prisoners are encouraged to play sports or do yoga and so on, and basketball is popular. I think that would be the best thing for her.”
Generally, though, the conditions are difficult. Tuberculosis is common in the colonies, many prisoners are malnourished from the limited food and the medical care is poor. Most need friends and family to send them food and basic toiletries, but that isn’t possible for some prisoners.
There is still hope, though, that Griner will not have to live out her nine-year sentence, and that she’ll be part of a prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia. In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Biden administration said that they are in discussions with Russia to swap the WNBA star and Paul Whelan, another American imprisoned in the country, for a not-yet-named Russian prisoner held in the U.S.
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