US Citizen Held In Russia Over Donation To Ukraine

Ksenia Karelina had been looking forward to spending New Year's Eve with her family. Though she'd long ago chosen to settle in the USA, she'd kept in touch with her relatives back in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Instead, it appears that the 32-year-old dual citizen is confined in a Russian jail cell on charges of high treason – all for allegedly sending $51.80 to a Ukrainian charity.

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“She’s just that kind of person,” Karelina’s former mother-in-law Eleonara Srebroski, 56, tells The Independent. “If somebody needs help, she will be helping. Whether it’s an animal, or a child, or a grown-up, she’s the one who is always opening her heart and her wallet.”

According to Russian human rights activists, Karelina – also known as Ksenia Khavana, after her first husband – was arrested on public order charges in late January outside a cinema in Yekaterinburg, before being charged with treason this month.

The country’s notorious Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed in a statement this week that an unnamed woman, later identified by Russian media as Karelina, had been “proactively collecting funds” for the Ukrainian war effort.

Now Srebroski has a stark message for the government and people of her former daughter-in-law’s adopted nation.

“If we do not do anything, she is going to die in jail,” she says. “She does not have any hope to get out, because they do not have any justice [in Russia]. And if we as a country do not help her to come back here, to where she is... we’re going to lose a beautiful person.”

Ksenia Karelina appeared in Srebroski’s life back in 2012, when she visited the older woman’s Baltimore home with Srebroski’s son Evgeny Khavana. The young woman had come to the USA from Russia on a work and travel programme, where she met Evgeny. As it happened, she and Srebroski originally came from the same region: the Ural mountains, of which Yekaterinburg is the district capital.