The family of former U.S. Marine Robert Gilman, who is serving a sentence in a prison colony in the Russian city of Voronezh, fears he may be near death, according to an Aug. 6 report by Reuters. The U.S. raised the issue of Gilman’s release during a meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Manila on July 23.
According to rights groups cited by the news agency, the 32-year-old Gilman has been regularly abused in the penal colony, complaining of torture and injections of psychoactive drugs.
In late June, Gilman fell into a dissociative stupor, a trauma-related condition in which a person becomes partly or completely immobilized. He was transferred from a prison hospital to the psychiatric ward of a civilian hospital. Neither the U.S. consul general nor Gilman’s lawyer was allowed to visit him there.
Russian media reported in early July that Gilman had indeed been transferred to a hospital due to “deteriorating health.” His exact diagnosis, however, was not announced.
Eric Lebson, a representative of the rights group Global Reach, said Gilman is now being fed through a tube. His sister believes he may be close to death.
A senior U.S. official told Reuters that the White House “is closely tracking Mr. Gilman's case and has made repeated, concerted outreach to the Russians calling for his return to the United States.”
Gilman is a U.S. citizen and former Marine. He was detained in Voronezh, about 340 miles south of Moscow, in January 2022. Later that year he was sentenced to four and a half years in a prison colony after being accused of fighting with a Russian police officer at a train station. The sentence was later reduced by one year.
Then, in the fall of 2024, Gilman was sentenced to another seven years in a high-security prison colony in cases involving alleged attacks on prison employees and a state investigator.
Reuters reported that Gilman is one of at least 10 Americans known to be imprisoned in Russia.
