A 48-year-old man with dual Russian and Belgian citizenship has been charged with treason in Russia following an attempt to visit his father, who recently suffered a heart attack. Mikhail Loshchinin’s family is scattered across Europe. He has lived in Germany for the past several years, working as a database administrator in Luxembourg. His mother is in Poland, his father is in St. Petersburg, and his sister is a Ukrainian citizen. Mikhail also has many friends in Ukraine, including an ex-girlfriend who is central to the criminal case against him in Russia. According to RFE/RL, the Loshchinins describe Mikhail as apolitical.

This summer, Mikhail Loshchinin set out for Russia on a motorcycle with German plates, reaching the border in Latvia on July 1. At the Ubylinka checkpoint on the Russian side, he presented his Russian passport. According to his mother, Olga, he didn’t use his Belgian passport because of the urgency of the trip and to avoid needing a visa. Russian border guards examined Loshchinin’s phone and likely discovered his many contacts in Ukraine. After holding him for several hours, the guards reportedly tricked him into crossing deeper into Russia, manufacturing grounds to arrest him for violating Russia’s border.

According to phone calls Loshchinin made to his mother, he was then detained for nearly a month at a hotel in the border town of Pytalovo, outside Pskov. When his family managed to hire a lawyer to visit him on August 1, Loshchinin was moved the next day to a pretrial detention center in Russia’s Belgorod region. Three weeks later, he resurfaced at another facility in Pskov, now facing treason charges for allegedly “financing representatives of a foreign state considered hostile to the Russian Federation.” His offense, it turned out, was giving money to his ex-girlfriend from Ukraine, who later added the Ukrainian flag to her profile photos on social media. “Even though she didn’t have [the flag] in 2022,” Loshchinin’s mother told RFE/RL.

After Loshchinin was moved from the hotel in Pytalovo, interrogators allegedly began torturing him, causing a retinal detachment. He told relatives that guards also seized his glasses, rendering him nearly blind. “He could move only hunched over with his head lowered. They forced him to undress completely and beat him. He was completely broken, and this was done deliberately — to destroy any hope of release and to coerce him into signing whatever paperwork they put before him,” Olga Loshchina said.

Mikhail’s best hope now appears to be the intervention of the Belgian government, but Belgian consular officials have made multiple unsuccessful attempts to visit him in detention, Olga told RFE/RL. Russia does not recognize his Belgian citizenship.