Ksenia Karelina, who was detained while traveling to Russia from Los Angeles, paints a bleak picture of a Russian detention center. Inmates were locked outside for hours in the cold.
Ksenia Karelina, a former semi-professional ballerina, is being held at the Yekaterinburg detention center after being detained while traveling to Russia from Los Angeles. She allegedly donated $51 to a Ukrainian charity. Karelina, who holds dual citizenship in the United States and Russia, has now painted a bleak picture of the horrific conditions she encountered at the Russian detention center. The squalid conditions, from being allowed to shower once a week to being left outside in icy temperatures, are sure to make your blood run cold.
Ksenia Karelina’s day reportedly starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m
Chris Van Heerden, Karelina’s boyfriend, told CNN that they were on vacation when she began to feel homesick. While Heerden flew directly back to California from her trip to Istanbul, she hoped to visit Russia and relive memories. However, the January flight she took in nostalgically loving hopes ended unexpectedly when she was detained. The 33-year-old is now an esthetician who works at a California spa. Here’s what the American ballerina told her boyfriend about the detention, which occurred 870 miles east of Moscow.
Chris Van Heerden spoke with Fox & Friends (Fox News) first about a letter from his girlfriend. It shed a lot of light on her time at the detention center and the living conditions provided to the inmates. Ksenia Karelina’s day reportedly starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m., when she is supposed to sleep. Despite the fixed bedtime, “the lights stay on all the time, so she’s got trouble sleeping.”
Karelina is granted access to fresh air via the jail’s rooftop
Karelina is granted access to fresh air via the jail’s rooftop. However, that brief period of mental escape has presented more dangers than expected. Guards have been known to lock the door, leaving inmates outside in the cold for hours. Because of her newfound fear, she has decided to stay inside at all times instead.
Former boxing champion Van Heerden told CNN in February that Karelina “had no fear, she was so proud to be going home…she’s so proud of Russia.” She was looking forward to meeting her elderly grandparents in Yekaterinburg, her hometown. However, this eventually became the basis for her arrest when she was charged with ‘treason’.
She could get 20 years in prison
She was initially detained only briefly, and Russian authorities confiscated her phone. Despite her quick release, the former boxing champion stopped hearing from Karelina as her return date to the United States approached. She was probably arrested in Yekaterinburg at this point. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FBS) charged her with treason, claiming that she had been “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against Russian security.”
According to the spa she worked at, she allegedly donated only $51 to a Ukrainian charity. This contradicted Van Heerden’s claims that his girlfriend was “so proud to be Russian” and that “she doesn’t watch the news, she doesn’t intervene with anything,” implying that she kept a distance from the political turmoil that had erupted following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She could get 20 years in prison. Furthermore, she is facing additional challenges due to a lack of legal representation, as lawyers are “afraid to just touch” her case. Van Heerden also stated that while a lawyer offered to assist her, they demanded “an insane amount of money.”