MOSCOW, December 21. /TASS/. After visiting US spy Paul Whelan in a maximum-security prison in the Volga area region of Mordovia on Thursday, Russian human rights activists confirmed his well-being.

"His condition is satisfactory," Lyudmila Rezyapkina, the deputy chair of the region’s Public Monitoring Committee, told TASS.

She said Whelan had informed activists about "certain issues related to his incarceration conditions," but gave no further details.

Former US career intelligence officer Paul Whelan was detained in Moscow on December 28, 2018, while receiving a USB drive containing information on operatives from an FSB division. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for espionage.

Mordovia’s regional branch of the Federal Penitentiary Service said in November that personnel at the correctional facility had broken up a confrontation between Whelan and another inmate before it turned into a fistfight. The latter hit Whelan on the left side of the face. The prison’s medical practitioner found a scratch under Whelan’s eye during a subsequent examination.