Ksenia Karelina, a 16-year-old freelance dancer of partially American roots, has been convicted of treason by a Russian court and given 12 years of imprisonment. This comes after she donated $51 to a charity in Ukraine; this action has caused a lot of uproar around the world.
Karelina was tried in a closed session and entered a guilty plea. She was arrested during a visit to her family in Yekaterinburg in January. She had lived in LA, where she took US citizenship in 2021. Investigators demanded that Zhukova be imprisoned for fifteen years, but the court limited the term to twelve years in a general regime penal colony.
The FSB, which is Russia’s Federal Security Service, charged Karelina with financing an unknown Ukrainian organisation, which, in their opinion, delivers arms to the military. Her donation was said to have been made when Russia launched a full-scale war in Ukraine in February this year. Karelina’s lawyer declared that she wanted to use the money for delivering humanitarian aid and is going to appeal against the verdict.
The charity Razom for Ukraine has refuted the allegations, stating it has not collected money for weapons but for helping people.
Boxer Chris Van Heerden, Karelina’s boyfriend, complained that the U. S. State Department did not include Karelina in a prisoner exchange that recently took place. He said this to get her status changed to ‘wrongfully detained’ so as to pave the way for her repatriation in coming negotiations.
In the period after the invasion, the repression against dissent has only increased, with more than one thousand criminal cases opened against people protesting against the war. Thanks to Karelina’s story, more attention is paid to real instances of how Russia persecutes dissenters.
