Siberian journalist Maria Ponomarenko, who was sentenced to six years in prison in February on a charge of discrediting the Russian military, has been transferred to a prison in the city of Krasnoyarsk, 1,000 kilometers away from her native city of Barnaul, where her children are staying with their grandparents.
The Telegram channel RusNews reported on May 17 that Ponomarenko arrived at the prison in Krasnoyarsk two days earlier.
Ponomarenko and her supporters have condemned the decision to transfer her so far away from her native Altai region, saying it amounts to a violation of her two children's right to regularly visit their mother.
Ponomarenko was arrested in St. Petersburg in April 2022 and later transferred to Barnaul, where she had worked for the RusNews website.
The charge against her stemmed from her online posts about an attack by Russian warplanes on a theater in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol that is believed to have killed hundreds of civilians, including children.
More than 1,000 civilians were believed to be sheltering in the theater when it was destroyed in an attack in March 2022, weeks after Russia launched its full-scale aggression against Ukraine in late February.
Russia's military denied that it attacked the theater, which was later razed to the ground after Russian forces captured the port after a brutal siege.
Ponomarenko said in March that she was beaten and humiliated after she was transferred from Barnaul to a detention center in the city of Biisk, where she was kept in a psychiatric clinic for three days, underwent a "psychiatric evaluation," and was forcibly injected with unknown substances when she demanded her personal belongings or hygiene items.
Human rights watchdogs have demanded Ponomarenko's immediate release, saying the psychiatric evaluation of criminal suspects should not include any injections.