An Israeli-US woman sentenced by a Russian court to seven-and-a-half years in jail for drug trafficking has asked President Vladimir Putin for a pardon, her lawyers were quoted as saying Sunday.
Naama Issachar "decided to ask the Russian president for a pardon and a written request has been filed," the lawyers said in a statement quoted by Russian press agencies.
Issachar, 26, was arrested at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport in April as she travelled from India to Israel.
Russian authorities said they found nine grammes (three ounces) of cannabis in her checked luggage.
The announcement of her request for a pardon was made two days after Issachar's mother Yaffa met Putin when he was on an official visit to Israel.
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Following the meeting, the mother told media that Putin had "promised" he would send her daughter back home.
Putin said he had sought to reassure the mother: "I told her, and I shall say it again: everything will be fine."
On Saturday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Issachar could not be pardoned unless she asked to be.
"How can you issue a pardon if the young woman does ask for one?" Peskov was quoted by news agencies as saying.
"You must at least respect a few formalities to get the process started," he added.
A discussion with her lawyers after those remarks led to Issachar deciding to make a formal request in writing, the lawyers were quoted as saying.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yaffa Issachar had already asked Putin several times to free the young woman.
In December, Issachar lost an appeal against the seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence, which Netanyahu has described as disproportionate.
The Israeli foreign ministry had called the verdict "harsh and disproportionate" and President Reuven Rivlin had appealed to Putin's "mercy and compassion" when asking him to intervene in the case.
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