Kidnapped Mother tries to bring home son jailed as 'spy' in Russia

Ivan Zabavskyi was looking for his mother when he disappeared. It was September 2022, and he had grown increasingly nervous as he read reports of intense fighting in the area where Maryna lived. Eventually, he decided to cycle across the frontline to rescue her.

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That was the last anyone saw of him, until he appeared in a courtroom in St Petersburg last month, accused of being a Ukrainian spy.

As Russia's full-scale invasion reaches its three-year mark, Ivan and Maryna's story of kidnapping, torture and separation is just one of hundreds of thousands of family tragedies that have afflicted Ukrainians across the country.

Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been seized by Russian troops in occupied territory over the past three years. Some end up dead, many languish in black detention sites, while others, like Ivan, eventually turn up in Russian courtrooms on criminal charges.

Ivan was the type of person you could rely on if you were in a tight spot, friends and family agreed.

He was "kind and good-hearted, maybe even a bit naive", said his cousin Yulia. Fiercely loyal to loved ones, he had always been close to his mother.

Maryna Zabavska was born in Tavilzhanka, a village in Kharkiv region close to the border with Russia, to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother from Leningrad.

Ivan was born in 1995, and she raised him as a single parent, with help from her mother. The trio spoke Russian at home, and Ivan went to the same school in Tavilzhanka that his mother had attended two decades earlier.

When Ivan got older, he DJed on the weekends at the village nightclub, and later he opened a fast-food kiosk, serving burgers and kebabs. His business struggled during the pandemic, and he moved to the metropolis of Kharkiv in the hope of making more money, so he could supplement the income his mother made as a cleaner. He dreamed of having a wife and children.

When the Russians rolled into the Kharkiv region during the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Tavilzhanka fell under occupation, while Kharkiv remained in Ukrainian hands.

With no mobile reception in the occupied zone, and no way to cross the lines, Ivan was cut off from his mother for months.