Basketball star Brittney Griner, whose plight has generated widespread anger in the United States, has been sent to a remote Russian penal colony, her lawyers said on Thursday. The US athlete was handed nine years in prison in August for possessing vape cartridges with a small quantity of cannabis oil, after she was arrested at a Moscow airport in February. The 32-year-old’s case comes amid fierce tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine. “Brittney began serving her sentence at IK-2 in Mordovia,” lawyers Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov said in a…