‘Who will save my daughter?’

A Russian woman and a Ukrainian soldier fell in love. Now she’s in prison for treason, and he’s campaigning for her release.

In 2024, Svetlana Savelyeva, a Russian citizen, tried to enter a Ukrainian-held area of Russia’s Kursk region. She hoped to meet her long-distance boyfriend, Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Chechotka. Instead, Savelyeva was arrested, charged with attempted treason, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Now, her mother has been forced to leave Russia, and Chechotka is campaigning for Ukraine to secure Savelyeva’s release in a prisoner exchange. Novaya Gazeta Europe special correspondent Dmytro Durnev recounts the couple’s remarkable love story and asks if there’s any chance of a Russian citizen being handed over to Ukraine.

“All this time, my daughter has been in a PUNISHMENT CELL. Sveta was bitten to death by mosquitoes! The punishment cell is located in a damp basement. All the undesirables are sent there. A letter from my daughter herself came the other day. She was given the medications that the volunteers delivered on 26 June, almost a month ago. But this is great progress!!! Because during the almost two years she’s been in pre-trial detention, there was no talk of any medications!”

Novaya Europe’s correspondent received this indignant message from Svetlana Savelyeva’s mother, Lyudmila Afanasyeva. A 39-year-old from Irkutsk, Savelyeva has been shunted around official and unofficial Russian prisons for almost two years now. In April 2026, a court sentenced her to 15 years in prison for “attempted treason”. Now, she’s awaiting the final act in her personal legal drama — a hopeless appeal. The hearing was scheduled for 15 July, but the defendant wasn’t brought to court. Instead, Savelyeva was left in the punishment cell.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russian courts haven’t issued a single acquittal for “espionage” or “high treason”, and sentences for these crimes have only been reduced on appeal in isolated cases. Moreover, treason cases are classified. To do their job, lawyers (and other participants in the proceedings) must obtain clearance to work on such cases, and are generally prohibited from discussing the details.

We can only guess why Svetlana Savelyeva was placed in a punishment cell in Moscow’s Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 6. Rumours reached her mother that it had to do with the Public Monitoring Commission, a prisoners’ rights watchdog that’s been co-opted by the Russian authorities. The Commission was once staffed with independent people who actually helped inmates. But those days are gone, and now there’s no way to find out what happened.

That said, we do know the basic contours of Svetlana Savelyeva’s case — and it seems absurd, even by the standards of wartime Russia.

The woman with the suitcase

Svetlana Savelyeva met Oleksandr Chechotka on Chatroulette in 2022. A professional English translator, Svetlana also speaks Tatar and fluent Ukrainian, the latter thanks to her beloved grandfather from Kharkiv (Lyudmila Afanasyeva’s father). Oleksandr is an experienced sergeant in the Ukrainian military who has fought intermittently since 2014. Between missions, he would sometimes go on Chatroulette to troll Russian users. After his second conversation with Svetlana, they exchanged contact information and began a long-distance romance that would last for two years.

The couple wanted to meet in person, but Russia’s full-scale invasion made it practically impossible for Russian citizens like Svetlana to enter Ukraine. She left Russia, living in Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Turkey, and learned firsthand that Russian passport holders aren’t welcome at the Ukrainian border when she tried to enter the country through Moldova and was turned away.

Then, in October 2024, Svetlana had an idea: what if she could reach her fiancé via Russian territory, travelling across the front line from Kursk to Ukrainian-held Sudzha by taxi? Having packed a big suitcase, she found a driver willing to make the journey.

“If I had talked her out of that trip, none of this would have happened!” laments Oleksandr. “Although I told her, ‘Drop everything. Toss your suitcase and get out of there!’”

What happened next is unclear. On 16 October, 2024, Svetlana stopped answering her phone. The taxi driver’s name was later revealed in the court verdict; he was fined 150,000 rubles (about €1,500), a strikingly lenient penalty for such a case. How Svetlana was detained remains unknown. Did the driver deliver her to the FSB himself? Were they caught at a checkpoint? Or was she being pursued by the security services all along?

According to her mother, Svetlana was beaten, tortured, and threatened with sexual violence for weeks at various locations, including hotels and rental apartments. The Federal Security Service (FSB) agents allowed her to call both her mother and her Ukrainian soldier fiancé.

Oleksandr spoke to Novaya Europe’s correspondent via video link while on his latest combat rotation. He was stationed in a small village near Dobrysheve, in the Donetsk region. The other members of his brigade don’t know anything about his love affair with a Russian woman, and he doesn’t share this information.

“You do realise which country she’s a citizen of, right?” Oleksandr asks rhetorically. “Until all the buzz started, I didn’t really advertise it. Honestly, I didn’t think she would survive [the initial weeks after her detention],” he continues. “They were putting on an act, giving her a paper to read from on screen to [incriminate her]. She disappeared for a week, and I thought that was it, but then she got in touch from a different number.

“She showed her hands in handcuffs and flashed a piece of paper — they’d written down what she needed to say. Then I wrote, ‘FSB?’ She nodded her head. ‘Are they beating [you]?’ She nodded again.”

After that, a Russian FSB officer tried to recruit Oleksandr. He turned him down tactfully, so as not to make Svetlana’s situation even worse. Meanwhile, Oleksandr had already contacted the hotline for Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. SBU officers immediately came to his frontline position. Under a plausible pretext, they quietly took Oleksandr out of the combat zone for a day to discuss the situation, and then just as quietly returned him to his post. His fellow soldiers were none the wiser.

Superfluous people 

Oleksandr has spent more than a decade at war. “I’m doing good things,” he says, explaining his role at the front. Thoughtful and well-read, Oleksandr often quotes the Ukrainian classics, and he travelled extensively throughout his homeland before the war. At his unit’s last site of deployment, a village in the Kherson region, Oleksandr and his brothers-in-arms erected a monument to the Ukrainian Cossacks at their own expense. He knows the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ new commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatiy, personally, having fought under his command in a previous brigade.

Although Oleksandr has tried to keep his story from his fellow soldiers, he is well known among journalists. When he and Lyudmila Afanasyeva jointly appealed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek Svetlana’s release in a prisoner exchange, Oleksandr used his full details. And in late June 2026, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov shared Svetlana and Oleksandr’s story in a closed hearing with members of the European Parliament, calling on them to push for exchanges, amnesties, or pardons for Russian prisoners of conscience. Muratov also urged the European parliamentarians to appeal to Ukraine to exchange Russian political prisoners for Ukrainian collaborators and informants.

According to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, there are currently around 2,000 verified Ukrainian civilians detained in Russian prisons. Another 16,000 are listed as missing during the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories. The Ukrainian authorities currently are prioritising the release of 494 captive Ukrainian women, along with the seriously ill and those who have been imprisoned the longest.

“My position is that all civilians illegally detained by the Russians must be recognised as civilians and must be unconditionally released!” Lubinets says. However, Savelyeva’s case is much more complicated. “I can’t say anything about this particular case, but I will speak theoretically, as you requested,” says Lubinets. “I am the ombudsman for citizens of Ukraine and, with all due respect to representatives of all other countries, until the issue of protecting the rights of Ukrainian citizens is resolved, we can raise questions about protecting the rights of citizens of other countries, but for me, they certainly will not be a priority.”

The question about Savelyeva, a Russian citizen, takes Lubinets by surprise, but just barely. He’s learned a lot about the political and humanitarian consequences of war over the past four years.

Be that as it may, Lubinets is the only Ukrainian official who has articulated a simple message loud and clear: the problems of Russian citizens are outside the purview of the Ukrainian authorities, and Ukrainian efforts to secure Svetlana’s release are unlikely.

Novaya Europe’s correspondent spent more than three months seeking comments on Svetlana Savelyeva’s case from other sources within the Coordination Headquarters and people who worked there at different stages. All of them refused.

In search of a precedent

Svetlana’s mother, Lyudmila Afanasyeva, is now leading the fight for her release. Though she has difficulty walking, she managed to get to Svetlana’s court hearings in Kursk and see her. She recalls how the FSB officers laughed at her as she shouted in their faces that she would make their names public.

“Bazdyrev, Stanislav Yuryevich and Gorlov, Aleksandr Igorevich,” Afanasyeva says, adding that she still has the scrap of paper on which Bazdyrev wrote their names and phone numbers. They wanted her to call Oleksandr in Ukraine. “They kept waiting and hoping [that I would help them],” she says.

In her hometown of Irkutsk, Afanasyeva’s home burned down. Having previously depended on her daughter for support, she left everything behind and travelled to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. She spoke to Novaya Europe’s correspondent by phone from Serbia, where Oleksandr pays for her rental apartment.

“They’re going to kill her, my little daughter! She’s grown so thin, she’s gone so grey, soon she’ll have spent two years in prison! Who will save her?” Lyudmila Afanasyeva cries desperately into the receiver.

Afanasyeva has filed appeals with every organisation she thinks could help: Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Ukrainian Ombudsman’s office, and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself. All of these enquiries brought polite but evasive responses. She even received a call from a young woman in Ukraine, purportedly from the Coordination Headquarters, who politely and meticulously took down information about Svetlana’s case.

Some precedents help Afanasyeva hold out hope. In December 2019, Ukraine secured the release of Vasily Derkach, a Russian pensioner and longtime resident of the Donetsk region. Derkach had been imprisoned twice, in 2014 and 2018, and was returned to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange. (As of 2022, Derkach was living in Russia’s Rostov region.)

A more recent case involved a Russian citizen named Grigory, who fought for Ukraine in an assault regiment. Grigory was taken prisoner and had both legs amputated while in Russian captivity. Today, he’s back in Ukraine and has received Ukrainian citizenship. Novaya Europe’s correspondent was unable to ascertain when he was exchanged. Grigory refuses to speak to journalists, but a social worker and one of his brothers-in-arms said that while in captivity in Russia, Grigory was considered a Russian citizen and not treated favourably. Nevertheless, he was handed over in a prisoner swap.

Speaking generally, Russia’s war against Ukraine has no boundaries, conventional restrictions, or rules. But this correspondent has observed certain rituals that have developed around prisoner swaps. Civilians are harder to get back than soldiers, and Special Operations Forces members are handed over more readily than ordinary volunteers; Russia tries not to give up members of the Azov Battalion, but takes back its soldiers from Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and conscripts from the Kursk region, at any price. There’s a lot of grief, but much is possible.

That’s why Lyudmila Afanasyeva continues her desperate cries about her daughter’s troubles, and why Oleksandr Chechotka signs every appeal and supports his beloved’s mother in Serbia. And why we published this unhopeful story.