Russian woman who lived in Ukraine for more than a decade faces treason charges after returning to Moscow to replace her passport

Russian authorities have opened a treason case against Svetlana Golovatenko, who lived in Kyiv for over a decade working as a manicurist before flying to Moscow via Georgia in April to renew her expired passport and re-register her Donetsk home. She was detained on arrival at Vnukovo Airport and jailed for 15 days on a 'petty hooliganism' charge, then hit with seven more identical charges processed across multiple courts.

After the last of these sentences concluded on August 4, authorities appears to have opened the treason case, according to independent outlet Mediazona. The report notes a similar case against dual Russian-Belgian citizen Mikhail Loshchinin, sentenced in June to 16 years for treason stemming from 2022 messages with a Ukrainian ex-girlfriend who had asked him for money.

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