IK-2 Mordovia: the harsh, notorious penal colony holding Brittney Griner

The US basketball star Brittney Griner will endure harsh conditions inside the remote Mordovian penal colony to which she has been sent this week to serve her nine-year prison sentence, human rights experts and former prisoners of the colony have said.

Deep in the taiga, IK-2 is part of a sprawling network of penal colonies in the north-west of the Mordovia region, about 300 miles east of Moscow. The prisons were built in the early 1930s as part of the gulag system of the Stalin era and together make up one of the largest penal complexes in Europe

During the time of quarantine, it is determined which otryad, or detachment, a prisoner will join for the duration of their sentence. The otryad is the basic building block of a Russian colony. The word refers both to the physical space and the social unit to which a prisoner belongs.

Human rights workers have for years documented incidents of torture and sexual abuse in Russian male prisons. While that level of violence is less common in female colonies, experts say bullying by fellow prisoners as well as violence perpetrated by prison guards is frequent.

Tolokonnikova, who spent two years at IK-14 and went on hunger strike over her prison conditions, described in the letter how she was forced to sew police uniforms for 17 hours a day with other exhausted inmates.

In 2021, investigators concluded that they did not find any violations inside the prison. But in a sign that the authorities were growing unhappy with the public complaints, Kimyaev was recently replaced by a female head, Yelena Pozdnyakova.

Griner will hope she will not have to spend much of her nine-year sentence behind bars. Since her arrest, the US administration has been pushing to involve her in a prisoner exchange with Russia, potentially swapping her for the convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Russia made a positive noise on Friday on a potential swap, but for now Griner will have to adapt to her new life. Human rights experts were split on whether the her high-profile status would protect her in jail.