A translator from the Irkutsk Region wanted to visit her boyfriend in Ukraine. She was detained, tortured, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
A court in Kursk has found Svetlana Savelyeva guilty of attempted treason and conspiring to cross the border illegally.
Savelyeva was detained in October 2024 in the Kursk Region and then held under administrative arrest until mid-December on the pretext that she had disobeyed the police’s orders. In December, she was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center on criminal charges.
According to the FSB investigators, Savelyeva had undergone “military training” in Kazakhstan, after which she planned to join the Ukrainian army during its partial occupation of the Kursk Region.
The translator herself said that she wanted to travel to Ukraine to reunite with her boyfriend, a Ukrainian army soldier named Alexander.
“We tried many ways to get her here to where I was. When Ukrainian troops entered the Kursk Region, Sveta was in Armenia, if I’m not mistaken. And then suddenly she says, Here I am, I’ll try to get into the area controlled by Ukraine. The biggest mistake was that I did, after all, let her go to Kursk,” the Ukrainian soldier told reporters.
FSB officers tortured Savelyeva to obtain a confession: they kept her naked in a cold room, beat and choked her, subjected her to electric shocks, and threatened her with murder and sexual violence.
In addition to Savelyeva, criminal charges were filed against driver Igor Sandulyak, who agreed to drive her to the front line. The regional court fined him 150,000 rubles [approx. 1,600 euros].
Source: Mediazona (Facebook), 2 April 2026. Translated by Thomas Campbell, who asks our fellow translators, wherever they are, to share this post in solidarity with Ms. Savelyeva.
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