MOSCOW—A former U.S. Marine serving a nine-year jail sentence in Russia has started a hunger strike to protest against his incarceration and alleged violations of his rights, his family said, a statement Russian prison authorities said was untrue. Trevor Reed, a university student from Texas, was last year convicted of endangering the lives of two policemen in Moscow while drunk on a visit in 2019. He denied the charge and Washington called his trial a “theatre of the absurd.” “We have received a report from an attorney that Trevor has begun a hunger strike to protest his arbitrary detention and Russian authorities’ numerous and flagrant violations of his basic human rights and his rights under Russian law,” his family said in a statement late on Monday. Regional prison authorities in Mordovia, where Reed is being held, denied his rights were being abused or that he was on hunger strike. “He …