She fell in love with a Ukrainian soldier. Russia put her on trial for treason.
Svetlana Savelyeva, a translator from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, traveled to Russia’s Kursk region in October 2024 with the goal of crossing the border into Ukraine. She hoped to reach her fiancé, a Ukrainian soldier waiting across the front line. Instead, she was arrested and tortured by the FSB. Savelyeva now faces trial for attempted treason, having been accused of training for combat herself. Meduza summarizes Savelyeva’s story, based on reporting by the independent outlet People of Baikal.
Svetlana Savelyeva stopped calling her mother and replying to her messages in mid-October 2024. By then, she had long since left her hometown of Irkutsk, living in Moscow, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and then Turkey before returning to Russia. No matter where she was, she stayed in constant contact. When she missed their daily call, her mother, Lyudmila, grew alarmed. On October 23, she reported her daughter missing.
Four days later, Svetlana called from her own phone late at night. She said she was being held in a basement. “She was chattering from the cold. Her voice was terrified,” Lyudmila recalls. “She said they had stripped her naked, kept her in the cold, beaten her over the head with their fists, and shocked her with electricity.”
Svetlana told her mother she was facing 20 years in prison for alleged terrorism. The call lasted only minutes. Lyudmila says her daughter managed to tell her that she was being taken away for another beating before the line went dead.
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Lyudmila eventually located her daughter at the FSB office in Kursk, a city in western Russia near the border with Ukraine. At the time, part of the Kursk region was occupied by Ukrainian forces. She still doesn’t know how Svetlana ended up there — only that she was detained on October 16. Lyudmila also doesn’t know where her daughter was held or what happened to her during the five days before her first court appearance.
On October 21, a district court in Kursk sentenced Svetlana to ten days in jail for “disobeying a lawful order from a police officer.” According to the court, she had been stopped on the street while intoxicated and refused a medical examination. The date of the alleged “offense” is redacted. She was then charged with another misdemeanor under the same statute and given additional jail time. The reason and length of that sentence were not made public.
Two months after her initial arrest, on December 16, Svetlana was released. Her mother was waiting at the gates, tipped off by another woman who had been held with her and released earlier. “I saw my daughter: thin, exhausted, with gray hair,” Lyudmila says.
Svetlana was immediately arrested again, in front of her mother, this time on criminal charges of treason. They rode together to the pre-trial detention center. On the way, Svetlana managed to say that some of the men who tortured her had worn balaclavas to hide their faces. She said they had threatened to kill her and pressured her to confess.
In Kursk, FSB officers questioned Lyudmila as a witness. They asked whether she was ethnically Russian and what connections her daughter had to Ukraine. “They told me Svetlana had undergone military training in Kazakhstan,” Lyudmila recalls. “What training? She’s so thin, so fragile.”
Svetlana was ultimately charged with “attempted treason.” The “evidence,” investigators said, was found on her phone: photographs of train stations, money transfers from her fiancé, and their private correspondence.
‘Do you have any idea what it means to cross a front line?’
Svetlana and Oleksandr met online. At the time, she was divorced and living with her mother in Irkutsk, earning a living as a translator. She worked with a video game company and translated pharmaceutical documents from English.
Oleksandr is a soldier in the Ukrainian army and has been at the front since the start of the full-scale war. Svetlana is Russian, but neither of them believed that had to stand in the way of a relationship.
“Why do people fall in love? It just happens,” Oleksandr says. “She’s interesting, well-read, intelligent. We talked a lot. She was always against the war.”
The pair spoke online for two years. Eventually, they decided they wanted to be together. But the logistics proved nearly impossible. Svetlana tried several routes into Ukraine — through Moldova, through Belarus — and was turned away each time. Then she came up with another idea: to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory through Russia’s Kursk region.
Oleksandr didn’t believe the plan could work and begged her not to go. He now blames himself for failing to stop her. “My biggest mistake was that I ultimately let her go to Kursk,” he says. “Someone told her you could reach the front line in a day. I kept explaining that it’s impossible. I said, ‘Do you have any idea what it means to cross a front line? Crossing a front line isn’t like going through customs between Kazakhstan and Russia. Every meter, there’s a war happening.’”
The last time Svetlana called him, she told Oleksandr she was leaving Kursk. At four in the morning, she got into a taxi. “She gave me the driver’s number,” Oleksandr recalls. “He started babbling: ‘I can take her wherever she wants — even to Three Sisters,’” a former checkpoint at the junction of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
He talked a good game, but I told her there would be trouble. She said, “My suitcase is in his car.” I told her, ‘Forget the suitcase. Just go to the train station.” Her documents were with her. Maybe it was the driver who turned her in — I don’t know.
On Svetlana’s phone, Russian investigators found a Kazakh bank app and money transfers from Ukraine. Oleksandr says he sent her the money, wiring the funds to her Kazakh account due to restrictions on direct bank transfers between Ukraine and Russia.
“He wanted her to move to him,” Lyudmila says. “They planned to get married. They said they’d bring me too — we’d all live together.”
‘Svetlana took care of everyone’
After being questioned in Kursk, Lyudmila returned to her home in Irkutsk and immediately applied for a passport. On February 20, 2025, officers came to search her apartment. The next day, passport in hand, she left Russia. She now lives in Georgia.
“She’s guilty of only one thing — falling in love with a Ukrainian!” Lyudmila says of her daughter. “My father, Svetlana’s grandfather, was born in Kharkiv. We have relatives in Odesa. He adored her — they’re together in so many of her childhood photos. If he knew that his granddaughter was suffering like this for loving a Ukrainian, he’d be turning in his grave.”
Svetlana managed to give her mother Oleksandr’s contact information. The two now speak regularly and support one another. He helps Lyudmila financially, sending money after she fled Russia without any belongings or savings.
Lyudmila walks with a cane. Her joint disease is progressing, but she says she pays little attention to her own health. Her focus is on her daughter. She sends packages to the detention center with warm clothes and food. Svetlana’s trial began on February 10 and is being held behind closed doors. Lyudmila says her daughter has grown gaunt and her hair has turned gray.
“Svetlana took care of everyone,” Lyudmila says. “Our home was always full of stray dogs and cats she’d brought in from the street. If you were sad, she’d lift your spirits. Even now, from the detention center, she sends me encouraging letters. She’s unwell herself, but she asks about my health, jokes, comforts me, reassures me, gives me hope.”
Lyudmila’s hope is that Svetlana will be released in a future prisoner exchange. “If I didn’t have that hope,” Lyudmila says, “I would simply lie down and not get back up.”