Russian-Belgian dual citizen who traveled to Russia to visit his ailing father sentenced to 16 years for ‘treason’

Source: Ostorozhno Novosti

The Pskov Regional Court has sentenced Mikhail Loshchinin to 16 years in prison on charges of “treason.” Loshchinin was detained at the Russian border in the summer of 2025.

The court found him guilty of “financing representatives of a foreign state recognized as an adversary of the Russian Federation,” the Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported. The charge stemmed from a 2022 exchange of messages in which his former girlfriend in Ukraine asked him for money.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) found the messages on his phone after he entered Russia from Latvia on July 1, 2025. Loshchinin, a citizen of both Russia and Belgium, had been traveling by motorcycle to St. Petersburg to visit his ailing father. He had not lived in Russia since 2000.

Loshchinin’s support group said that on the pretext of illegally crossing a border zone, the programmer was detained and held for two weeks at a hotel in the border town of Pytalovo in the Pskov region — he was made to pay the bill himself. He was then transferred to Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in the Belgorod region, where captured Ukrainians are held. Loshchinin said he was tortured and beaten there.

He spent three weeks in the pretrial detention center in the Belgorod region without being charged before being transferred to Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in Pskov, where he was formally charged with “treason.”

Mikhail Loshchinin’s case has drawn widespread attention beyond Russia. The Belgian Embassy in Moscow repeatedly asked Russia’s Foreign Ministry to allow its staff to visit him, but diplomats were never granted access.

At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.

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Russian-Belgian dual citizen who traveled to Russia to visit his ailing father sentenced to 16 years for ‘treason’

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