Oleksandra Kazarovytska (Kolesnikova), co-founder of the “Professional” language school in Kharkiv, who was arrested in Russia, did not die in occupied Crimea, the independent Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe found.

News of the 44-year-old’s death in Russian custody first emerged in early November in posts by her friends and colleagues, but those reports were inaccurate, Novaya Gazeta Europe said. Some reports, for example, said the teacher might have died in a pretrial detention center in Sevastopol that doesn’t exist. Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne had earlier reported that Oleksandra never made it to Crimea at all.

Novaya Gazeta Europe interviewed Oleksandra’s friends and pieced together her story. The teacher was the daughter of a serviceman who transferred to the Russian army after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the family became Russian citizens living in Sevastopol. After finishing school, Oleksandra moved to Kharkiv to study and had lived and worked there ever since. (Earlier reports mistakenly said she and her family had recently been living in Turkey.)

Oleksandra’s friends described her as a patriot of Ukraine who had taught herself the language and was passionate about Ukrainian literature. She worked several jobs, taught, and was constantly learning new things herself, they said. After the annexation of Crimea, Oleksandra stopped traveling to the peninsula and instead met her parents, who had remained in Crimea the whole time, in Turkey or Georgia, her acquaintances said.

Iryna Salnik, a friend of Oleksandra’s, was among the first to report her death. She said Oleksandra had traveled to Crimea not to help her parents sell their house, as earlier reports claimed, but to renew her Russian documents. Authorities detained her after finding a chat on her phone with a volunteer she had corresponded with at the start of the full-scale war, Salnik said. Oleksandra was then held in solitary confinement for three months and, after she died, was buried in Sevastopol, Salnik said.

Exactly how Oleksandra entered Russian territory, where she was detained, and in which pretrial detention she was held remain unknown. Novaya Gazeta Europe found that Oleksandra died in Vladikavkaz. Her body was then brought to her parents in Sevastopol, where she was buried on November 3.

According to the official Russian version, Oleksandra took her own life on October 24. Her family and friends don’t believe this, in part because Oleksandra was a Buddhist, and her religion forbids suicide. Members of a Buddhist center in Sevastopol attended her funeral, and from them, another friend of the deceased, Anna Zelenska-Sumkina, learned that Oleksandra was “found hanging” and that by then she was no longer in a pretrial detention center but in a private residence, something like house arrest. Since the earliest reports of her death, the teacher’s friends have said, “Russia killed her.”

Representatives of the Ukrainian human rights group Zmina said Oleksandra’s case is not the first. Another example is that of Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian citizen who was trying to reach her father, who had cancer, in occupied Crimea. Russian security services detained her in December 2022 at the Russian-Georgian border. She was subjected to “carousel” arrests, and Russia’s Federal Security Service ultimately declared her a spy.