Journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been taken to a tuberculosis hospital in Barnaul, a major city in Siberia.

RusNews journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been taken to Tuberculosis Hospital No. 12 in Barnaul, a major city in Siberia, which falls under the authority of the local Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN). This was reported by her lawyer Dmitry Shitov on his Telegram channel.

The lawyer said that today he was unable to visit Ponomarenko. Staff at the institution cited a “sanitary day” as the reason.

According to Shitov, after he reached out to the FSIN regional hotline and the duty prosecutor, representatives from the regional FSIN office and the public monitoring commission got in touch with him.

“Unfortunately, by that time I had already reached Novosibirsk. But tomorrow I will be able to visit. They assured me that Maria is all right,” the lawyer wrote.

It is still unclear why Ponomarenko has been transferred to the hospital. Earlier, her support group and lawyer assumed that she would be taken to Penal Colony No. 6 in Shipunovo, but on 13 August it became clear that she was not at that facility.

In March, the Shipunovo District Court of Altai Krai sentenced Ponomarenko to one year and ten months in a penal colony on charges of causing non-serious harm to the health of a colony staff member (Part 2, Article 321 of the Criminal Code). Her lawyer specified that, after combining sentences and accounting for the time she had spent in pre-trial detention, her overall sentence increased by one month.

Ponomarenko was accused of attacking two penal colony employees who were going to take her to a disciplinary commission. Ponomarenko herself denied this, saying that prison staff had suffocated her with a pillow and slammed her head against the floor.

• In April 2022, Ponomarenko was detained in a criminal case for “spreading fakes” about the Russian army (Paragraph “d,” Part 2, Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). This was one of the first cases under the military “fakes” article, introduced in March 2022. The grounds for prosecuting the journalist was her post about the strike on the drama theatre in Mariupol. In February 2023, the court sentenced her to six years in a penal colony.
• During her time in detention, Ponomarenko has repeatedly reported pressure from FSIN employees, as well as violence in a psychiatric clinic. This spring, she slashed her wrists due to constant abuse by prison staff, and for some time she also went on hunger strike.