Svetlana fell in love with a Ukrainian soldier. She will be tried for treason against Russia

The 39-year-old Russian translator was arrested when she tried to cross the border into Ukraine to meet her fiance, Oleksandr. She was accused of receiving combat training and tortured by the FSB, and now faces a trial for attempted treason.

In October 2024, Svetlana Savelyevaa translator from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, traveled to the Russian region of Kursk with the aim of crossing the border into Ukraine.

I was hoping to get to the groomOleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier who was waiting for her on the other side of the front line. Instead, it turned out to be detained and tortured by the FSB, the Russian internal security service, direct heir to the famous Soviet KGB.

Savelyeva, 39, now faces a trial for attempted treason, accused of having herself received combat trainingsays the independent Russian portal.

Svetlana stopped calling his mother and to respond to his messages by mid-October 2024. By then, he had long since abandoned his hometown of Irkutsk, having lived in Moscow, Armenia, Kazakhstan and then Turkey before returning to Russia.

Wherever he was, he kept in touch permanent. When he missed the daily roll call, his mother, Lyudmilashe was alarmed. On October 23, he presented complaint about daughter’s disappearance.

Four days later, Svetlana called from her own cell phone, early in the morning. Said he was detained in a basement. “I was shaking from the cold. His voice was terrified,” remembers Lyudmila. “He said they had herarrested, kept in the cold, beaten punched in the head and subjected to electric shocks“.

Svetlana told her mother that she faced 20 years in prison for alleged terrorism. The call only lasted a few minutes. Lyudmila says that her daughter managed to tell her that they were take for another spanking session before the call drops.

Lyudmila turned out Locate daughter at FSB facility in Kurskin western Russia, near the border with Ukraine. At the time, part of the Kursk region was occupied by Ukrainian forces.

Even today he doesn’t know how Svetlana got there; only that she was arrested on October 16th. Lyudmila is also unaware where the daughter was held nor what happened to him during the five days before his first court appearance.

On October 21, a district court in Kursk sentenced Svetlana to ten days in prison for “disobedience to a legitimate order of a police officer.” According to the court, it had been approached on the street while drunk and had refused to submit to a medical examination.

A date of the alleged “infringement” is omitted in the records. She was then charged with a new misdemeanor under the same article and sentenced to more days in prison. The reason and duration of this sentence were not made public.

Two months after her initial arrest, on December 16, Svetlana was released. Her mother was waiting for her at the door, warned by another woman that she had been arrested with her and released earlier. “I saw my daughter: thin, exhausted, with gray hair“, diz Lyudmila.

Svetlana too immediately detained again, in front of her motherthis time based on thecriminal charges of treason. They made the journey to the pre-trial detention center together. On the way, Svetlana managed to say that some of the men who tortured her wore hats to hide the face. She said they had threatened her with death and pressured her to confess.

In Kursk, FSB officers interrogated Lyudmila as a witness. They asked him whether she was ethnically Russian and what connections her daughter had with Ukraine. “They told me that Svetlana had received military training in Kazakhstan,” recalls Lyudmila. “What instruction? She’s so thin, so fragile“.

Svetlana ended up being accused of “attempted treason”. To the “evidence“, the investigators said, were found on your cell phone: photographs of train stations, Groom’s bank transfers and private correspondence between both.

Oleksandr says he was the one who sent her the money, transferring the funds to her Kazakh account due to restrictions on bank transfers direct exchanges between Ukraine and Russia.

Svetlana is Oleksandr they met online. At the time, she was divorced and lived with her mother in Irkutsk, earning a living as a translator. He worked for a video game company and translated pharmaceutical documentation from English to Russian.

Oleksandr is a soldier in the Ukrainian army and has been at the front since the beginning of the war. Svetlana is Russianbut neither of them believed that this had to be an obstacle to the relationship.

“Why do people fall in love? It just happens,” says Oleksandr. “She is interesting, cultured, intelligent. We talked a lot. He was always against war.”

The couple communicated online for two years. Over time, they decided they wanted to be together. But logistics proved almost impossible. Svetlana tried several routes to enter Ukraine — through Moldova, through Belarus — and was prevented from doing so in all of them. Then another idea came to him: to reach territory controlled by Ukraine through the Russian region of Kursk.

Oleksandr did not believe that the plan could work and begged him not to go. Today he blames himself for not being able to stop her. “My biggest mistake was that I ended up letting her go to Kursk,” he says.

“Someone told you it was possible reach the front line in one day. I insisted it was impossible. I said to him: “Do you have any idea what it means to cross a front line? Crossing a front line is not like going through customs between Kazakhstan and Russia. In every meter, there’s a war going on“.

“The only thing she is guilty of is falling in love with a Ukrainian!”, says Lyudmila about her daughter. After being interrogated in Kursk, she returned home to Irkutsk and immediately applied for a passport. On February 20, 2025, agents searched his apartment. The next day, passport in hand, he left Russia. Now lives in Georgia.

Lyudmila walks with a cane. The joint disease is progressing, but he says he pays little attention to his own health. His attention is focused on his daughter. Send packages to the detention center with warm clothing and food.

Svetlana’s trial began on February 10 and is taking place behind closed doors. Lyudmila says that the daughter is increasingly downcast and his hair turned gray.

“Svetlana took care of everyone,” says Lyudmila. “Our house was always full of abandoned dogs and cats that she brought in from the street. If you were sad, she would cheer you up. Even now, from the detention center, he sends me letters of encouragement. She herself is not well, but she asks about my health, makes jokes, consoles me, reassures me, gives me hope.”

Lyudmila’s hope is that Svetlana will be released in a future exchange of prisoners. “If I didn’t have this hope,” says Lyudmila, “I would simply I lay down and never got up again“.