Journalists say ‘spy’ in new FSB video is Ukrainian woman who was arrested en route to visit sick father in Crimea last year

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has released a video that it says shows a “detained Ukrainian spy.” The clip was published on Tuesday by the state-run media outlet RIA Novosti, which reported that the 25-year-old “spy” was “transmitting information about Russian military facilities and equipment belonging to the Eastern group of forces.” The woman has reportedly been arrested and charged with espionage.

According to the independent outlet Mediazona, the person in the video is most likely Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian citizen who was arrested by Russian intelligence services in December 2022 at the Verkhny Lars crossing on the Russia-Georgia border. The Ukrainian outlet Grati reported that Umerova was trying to travel to annexed Crimea to see her father, who has cancer.

According to Umerova’s brother, Aziz, the Russian authorities fined her for violating the country’s border rules and ordered her deportation. Umerova was reportedly held in a temporary detention center for foreigners near Vladikavkaz until mid-March, when the deportation order was rescinded. As she was leaving the detention center, Umerova was apprehended by four men who put a bag over her head and took her away in a vehicle.

In the weeks that followed, Vladikavkaz courts repeatedly sentenced Umerova to 15-day prison terms for allegedly disobeying police. In early May, relatives who went to the facility where she was being held reported that she had been taken away by FSB agents.