“Hollywood or nightmare”. How a Ukrainian refugee accidentally learned of her estranged father’s treason arrest in Russia while scrolling Instagram

Ksenia was only four years old when her parents divorced. It happened only a few years after the family had moved from Arctic city of Norilsk to a small town in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region; her father, Oleg Varyukhin stayed, while her mother took Ksenia and her older sister to another region. They had not spoken since.

But one evening this summer, her husband, Ravil Ganeev, was scrolling through Instagram when he stumbled upon a Mediazona post about a 61-year-old businessman who had been arrested at a Moscow airport and charged with treason.

“Isn’t this your father?” he asked his wife.

Ksenia recognised him immediately. “Even though we haven’t communicated for a long time, since my parents divorced when I was a child, this news was a crushing blow,” the 21-year-old told Mediazona.

Oleg Varyukhin’s arrest is among a series of shocks to Ksenia and her husband. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ksenia fled to Sweden under a temporary protection programme. Online, she met Ganeev, a Russian citizen who had fled his own country due to his anti-war views; Russian authorities have placed him on a wanted list for the “justification of terrorism” which he links to his social media posts against the war. In 2024, they married.

When Swedish authorities denied Ganeev asylum claim (despite a criminal case in Russia), Ksenia refused to leave her husband, and the couple was forced to relocate again. Recently, with the help of human rights defenders, France granted Ganeev a humanitarian visa.

“And now, when my father was also detained, I feel like the circle of persecution has closed around my entire family,” Ksenia says. “I have this feeling that this is just some kind of Hollywood film or total nightmare.”

Mediazona first reported on Varyukhin’s case in August. The 61-year-old former pilot, who ran a small perfume shop in Ukraine for decades, travelled to Moscow this May to sort out expired paperwork—born in the USSR, he even left the country for the last time using his Soviet passport. FSB officers at Vnukovo airport searched his phone and found tax receipts. Because Varyukhin was legally obligated as a businessman to pay Ukraine’s mandatory military tax, introduced in 2014 to support the armed forces, the Russian state charged him with treason for “financing” the enemy.

Despite the absurdity of equating tax compliance with treason, the Russian justice system continues to process his case. On September 17, Moscow’s Meshchansky Court extended Varyukhin’s pre-trial arrest until December 21. In its ruling, the court noted that the accused is “prone to constantly changing his place of residence” and “possesses clandestine skills.”

The court also formally declared Varyukhin a Russian citizen. His lawyer, Yuri Shel, continues to object that his client cannot be a subject of Article 275 of the Criminal Code (“Treason”) because he never even received a Russian passport, having left for Ukraine in the late nineties on his old Soviet documents. The court, however, relies on a 1991 law that automatically granted citizenship to former Soviet citizens who were permanently residing in Russia on February 6, 1992—when Varyukhin was living in the Arctic city of Norilsk.

During pre-trial detention, Varyukhin remains upbeat. “He stays positive. He asks for work, offering to voluntarily wash the dirty walls of the exercise yard with soap to clean off the spit and grime. They refused him,” Shel says. “He says: I can’t sit idle, I want to be of use to people.”

Varyukhin’s current wife, Natalia Pershko, who waited for him at the Moscow airport while he was being subjected to the first of several “carousel” arrests, is preparing to bring him warm clothes. Beyond occasional letters she has no news of her husband.

Natalia is also from Siberia and had also moved to the Zhytomyr region in the 1990s; they were raising a son, Georgy. She says Varyukhin attempted to obtain Ukrainian citizenship multiple times but was rejected, despite having Ukrainian-born kids, properties, and running a perfume business. The couple lived quietly on their old documents, running their shop and caring for stray cats until the full-scale invasion shattered their familiar life. In 2024, Ukrainian migration officials unexpectedly refused to renew Natalia’s residence permit—which she had held for nearly a quarter of a century—and gave her two weeks to leave the country.

She eventually settled with their son in neighbouring Moldova. Varyukhin sold his car to fund their relocation but stayed behind in Ukraine to keep their shop afloat, which was their only source of income. Fearing he would be barred from re-entering Ukraine if he left, the couple lived apart for nearly two years.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2026 that Varyukhin finally travelled to Chișinău to reunite with his family. From there, armed with a temporary return certificate issued by the consulate on his old Soviet passport, the couple boarded a flight to Moscow to finally update his documents. He was detained upon arrival.