A Russian court has granted early release for a Moscow student who was sent to prison for trying to join the Islamic State group in Syria.

The court in Russia's northwest on Tuesday upheld Varvara Karaulova's plea to cut her prison sentence by one year and 10 days. The 23-year old Moscow State University student was sentenced to 4½ years in prison in December 2016. She was arrested in Turkey, where she was trying to cross the border into Syria.

At least 4,000 Russian citizens, mostly from predominantly Muslim regions, have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join IS. Karaulova, from a middle-class, non-Muslim Moscow family, was an odd-one-out among Russian IS recruits who typically hailed from impoverished provincial backgrounds in the North Caucasus.