A Ukrainian student escaped Russia after being arrested for anti-war posts. Meduza’s sources say Putin’s daughter may have helped.
Until recently, Ukrainian national Serhiy Gulko was a high-achieving medical student at Russia’s top university. Then his classmates reported him for anti-war posts he made on his private Instagram account. In May, after serving three back-to-back jail terms, Gulko withdrew from the university and managed to leave Russia. According to Meduza’s sources, Gulko may have avoided criminal charges thanks to the intervention of Maria Vorontsova, the deputy dean of the school’s medical department and the daughter of Vladimir Putin. Meduza spoke to Gulko about his arrests, his departure, and why he chose to stay in Russia as long as he did.
Serhiy Gulko first moved from Odesa to Russia in 2016, when he enrolled in Moscow State University’s medical school. Though the war in the Donbas had been going on since 2014, he says he faced little discrimination or harassment for his nationality during his initial years at the school.
“[Students from Ukraine] were generally treated fine [at that point],” he tells Meduza. “Although when I turned in my enrollment documents, they said, ‘Are you sure you’re a foreign student? Is Ukraine really a foreign country?’ But there was no blatant mistreatment.”
When Russia escalated the conflict into a full-scale invasion in 2022, Gulko had just returned to Moscow from Ukraine, where he’d helped his grandmother resolve issues related to her recent cancer diagnosis. On February 24, his sister called him early in the morning and told him what was happening.
“I was stunned, to put it lightly,” he says. He was unable to stay silent: in addition to posting about the invasion on his Instagram story, he made a permanent post on his private account. While he didn’t say anything negative about ordinary Russians, he recalls, his post included “a ton of negative stuff about the Russian authorities, of course.” He continues:
I was very angry and wrote that we never wanted his war. […] At the time, I thought life in Russia would come to a standstill, people would take to the streets, and [the war] would come to an end, so I was writing quite actively [on social media]. For example, I posted a link to the Come Back Alive foundation, which was raising money for both military and humanitarian aid at the start of the war.
Meanwhile, despite the risks he faced as a vocally anti-war Ukrainian in Russia, Gulko decided to stay in Moscow. “It was a very hard decision, but I decided to finish my degree,” he says. “I wanted to earn my diploma, get a decent education, and become a doctor.”
When he wasn’t in class, Gulko spent his time interning in a hospital and taking part in medical olympiads. “I knew that adapting to a new place would just prolong the process of getting my career started,” says Gulko.
For nearly two years, he managed to avoid any trouble from the authorities. In March 2024, however, he received a Telegram message from an acquaintance warning him that some of his classmates had screenshotted his anti-war posts and were planning to report him.
“I probably should have left [Russia] at that point, but my thesis defense was coming up, my state exams were just around the corner, and I decided to stay,” he says.
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On April 3, Gulko was returning from a shift the hospital when he noticed a police car outside of his dorm building. When he approached the building, an officer got out of the vehicle and asked to see his documents. “[When he saw my Ukrainian passport,] he said, ‘You need to come with us,’” Gulko tells Meduza.
When Gulko arrived at the police station, there were three investigators waiting for him:
They told the officers on duty: “Get us a separate room where we can have a talk with him.” The officers said, “Fine, but be sure to clean up after yourself this time.” After that, I started feeling uneasy.
When the investigators began interrogating him, Gulko demanded a lawyer, but they told him he wasn’t allowed one. He then pleaded Article 51 of the Russian Constitution, which enshrines the right to avoid self-incrimination. In response, the officers took his phone, showed him screenshots of his anti-war posts, and demanded he write a confession statement. He recounts:
I wrote that I’d made those posts calling for people to donate to a Ukraine relief fund two years ago. They also searched through my phone and all of my financial transactions, but they didn’t find anything.
The following morning, Gulko was brought to a district court, where he was charged with “resisting the authorities” during his arrest. The judge sentenced him to spend the next 10 days in jail.
On the day of Gulko’s release, he was detained by police as soon as he exited the detention facility. Because it was the weekend, the officers brought him to a holding cell at their station, where he spent the next two nights. On Monday, he was brought back to the court, where he was sentenced to 12 more days in jail for a 2023 social media post reading “Glory to Ukraine!”
At the end of his second sentence, he was again met by police outside of the jail and taken to another police station. He tells Meduza:
The following morning, April 26, I was taken to the prosecutor’s office and served an order to leave the country within three days. After that, though, I was taken to the Tver District Court and sentenced to 12 [more] days for an Instagram story calling for a strike on Moscow, which I published after a [Russian] strike in Odesa that killed a family with a three-month-old baby. After serving that term, I was brought to the deportation center.
Meduza has learned from sources that after Gulko’s initial arrest, a third party reached out for help to Maria Vorontsova, the deputy dean of his university department and the daughter of Vladimir Putin. When asked whether the authorities’ relative leniency may have been a result of Vorontsova’s interference, Gulko says the following:
Frankly speaking, I think that there simply wasn’t enough of an evidentiary basis for [the authorities] to charge me with a felony. All they had were screenshots; they didn’t have any concrete actions on my part. I’m a citizen of a different country, so it’s unlikely they would charge me with treason. But it would be silly for me to deny that I got very lucky in this case. I’m doing fine now and I’m in a safe place.
While he feels fortunate to have escaped further prosecution in Russia, Gulko regrets not being able to get his degree. “I was the best in my year by far — I spent a lot of time in hospitals and even did surgeries myself. It’s hard to lose all of that,” he says.
At the same time, he tells Meduza, living in the country waging an aggressive war against his own took a psychological toll. “Every day, it took effort to mentally compartmentalize my studies and what was happening in my homeland,” he says. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s important to me to become a doctor, and the education at MSU really is wonderful.”
Gulko says his professors had a variety of views on the war but that a majority of them are “decent people and understand everything”:
Overall, I don’t believe that all Russians are bad. When I found myself in trouble, an unbelievable number of people helped me: my friends, human rights advocates, and complete strangers.
Meduza contacted Moscow State University’s Fundamental Medicine Department for comment but had not received a response at the time of this article’s publication.
Interview by Svetlana Reiter. English-language summary by Sam Breazeale.