‘I could snap your neck like a chicken’s’

A volunteer from Belgorod raised money for Ukrainian refugees. Now she’s going to prison for 22 years.

Soon after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belgorod resident Nadezhda Rossinskaya (also known as Nadine Geisler) began working to help Ukrainian refugees and victims of the occupation. But within months, her efforts drew threats and pressure from the Russian authorities, which eventually prompted her to leave the country for a year. Then, in late June 2025, a Moscow military court sentenced her to 22 years in prison and a 320,000-ruble ($4,100) fine, convicting her of treason, “aiding terrorist activity,” and “publicly calling for actions that threaten the country’s territorial integrity.” The independent journalists’ collective Bereg recently published an in-depth account of the case against Rossinskaya. Meduza shares an English-language translation of their report, edited for length and clarity.

‘Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong’

On social media, Nadezhda Rossinskaya went by the name Nadine Geisler, taking the surname of her grandfather. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she earned a living doing photoshoots, selling flowers, and doing animal rescue work. In March 2022, she and her sister, Yelena Yegorova, staged an anti-war protest in one of the city’s central squares, dressing in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and handing out potted flowers to passersby. The two women were detained and fined, but they were later acquitted on appeal.

Later that year, Rossinskaya founded a group called Army of Beauties, which worked to help Ukrainian refugees, deliver humanitarian aid to people under Russian occupation, and organize fundraisers for victims of flooding in Kherson following the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction. Rossinskaya also hosted refugees in her rented one-room apartment in Belgorod. She said she used an armored cash transport truck — purchased with donations — to deliver aid.

According to Rossinskaya, she fell foul of the Russian authorities because of her volunteer work. In an interview with the RFE/RL service Sever.Realii, she said that security forces and Moscow-installed officials in Ukraine’s occupied territories don’t want independent volunteers to know what’s really happening there. Rossinskaya learned, for example, that the occupation authorities in the village of Kozacha Lopan in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region had started charging locals a tax just to sell vegetables from their own gardens. She also discovered that humanitarian aid left by volunteers at the local village council building was being stolen. After that, she began delivering food and medicine directly to people’s homes.

In the summer of 2022, Rossinskaya’s bank cards were blocked. Just before that happened, she said, she started receiving transfers of 10 rubles (about $0.13) with messages like “This is for your funeral wreath” and “This is for your coffin.” In the fall of 2022, someone repeatedly opened fire near a warehouse in Belgorod that Army of Beauties was renting, at times when volunteers were stepping outside.

A few days after Rossinskaya returned from one of her trips to Kozacha Lopan, two men showed up at the warehouse and asked her how to send money for humanitarian aid. When she replied that her cards were temporarily blocked, they said: “Well, that’s your hello from Lubyanka for Kozacha Lopan. Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong,” Rossinskaya recalled later in an interview.

In May 2023, following a series of threats, Rossinskaya left Russia for Turkey, and then went to Georgia. A year later, however, she returned to Russia for reasons that remain unclear. A week after she came back, on February 1, 2024, FSB agents arrested her in a rented apartment in Belgorod and charged her with “publicly calling for actions that threaten the country’s territorial integrity.”

The charge was based on an Instagram post in which Rossinskaya allegedly urged people to donate to Ukraine’s Azov Brigade. That same post later became the basis for two more criminal cases against her — one for treason and another for aiding terrorism by allegedly sending money to the Ukrainian military.

In court, Rossinskaya said the account where the post appeared didn’t belong to her and that she never sent money to Ukraine’s military.

‘My family is their leverage’

In February 2022, Nadezhda Rossinskaya helped evacuate the family of a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Pereborshchykova from Cherkaski Tyshky, a village in the Kharkiv region that was under heavy shelling. The couple initially fled to Russia, then moved on to Georgia. From there, Iryna began helping Rossinskaya’s aid group: the Army of Beauties website listed Iryna’s Georgian bank account among donation options.

After Rossinskaya’s arrest, FSB officers visited the apartment of Iryna’s sister in Voronezh. From there, they called Iryna and asked why her bank details appeared on Rossinskaya’s social media profile. “I told them she saved us, and we’re very grateful. She stayed with us [in Georgia] for a couple of months before returning to Russia and was shocked by how we were living. We had holes in the walls,” Iryna recalled in an interview with Bereg.

According to Iryna, Rossinskaya offered to help raise money so the family could “at least patch the walls,” and they agreed to use Iryna’s card for donations. “Then the disaster at the Kakhovka Reservoir happened,” Iryna continued. “And what was I supposed to do? Just say thanks and move on? People started donating to my cards again.”

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Iryna said she agreed to speak with the Russian officers because she feared for her sister (they already knew her address) and other relatives living in Russia. According to her lawyer, Anton Prisny, donations were also sent to the Russian bank card of Iryna’s niece, who then passed the money on to Iryna. The niece later testified in court that she believed the funds were for her aunt’s dog shelter.

“My family is [the Russian security forces’] leverage,” Iryna said.

I could have just told them to get lost and refused to talk. But they’d have found another way to mess with my family — and forced us into contact anyway. My sister initially refused to appear in court, but they told her she’d be brought in by force. They asked her to help get me to visit her ‘due to her worsening health.’ Even the lawyer [Prisny] said it would be good if I came to Russia — that nothing would happen to me, since I’m a foreign citizen. But I haven’t lost my mind just yet.

After talking with the FSB, Iryna handed over information about the transfers she had sent to Ukrainians distributing aid. Before doing so, she consulted a friend in Ukrainian law enforcement, who she says told her the FSB would get the information anyway. “And now Prisny is telling me Nadine got slapped with God-knows-how-many years because of my testimony,” Iryna told Bereg.

The money sent to Iryna’s accounts went to Ukrainian volunteer Serhii Kovalchuk, who was helping people affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. “They zeroed in on Kovalchuk because he was receiving large transfers,” Iryna explained. “He was buying huge volumes of food and water — five-liter bottles by the truckload — for people hit by the flooding. I remember how happy Nadine was whenever he sent video updates. I have no idea why they decided he was sending money to the Ukrainian army. They even asked me if I knew Nadine was helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine. God forbid! That was never even discussed!”

Kovalchuk told Rossinskaya’s lawyer that he used the donations solely to buy humanitarian aid. According to Prisny, a video recording of that conversation was submitted as evidence in court. “His testimony is consistent with what my client said. He confirmed he received money from Pereborshchykova, but never from Rossinskaya,” Prisny told Bereg. “He said the money was used only to help civilians.” According to the lawyer, when the FSB spoke with Pereborshchykova, they told her, “If you want to help Nadezhda, here’s what you need to say.”

Investigators, Prisny said, presented no evidence in court that Kovalchuk had ever sent money to the Azov Brigade. As indirect proof, they cited Instagram links from Rossinskaya’s account to a second page under her name that called for donations to the Ukrainian military. Witnesses also testified that Rossinskaya herself had sent them links to that second page.

‘The sound of breaking bones’

Rossinskaya told investigators that other volunteers had access to her account and could have been the ones to send the link in question. “There’s no proof the account belongs to me. The transfers were made personally by a foreign citizen [Pereborshchykova], from her own device, using her mobile banking app. I had no access to any of it — and she told the security officers that herself,” Rossinskaya said in court.

Under Russian law, the maximum pretrial detention period for someone charged with a serious crime is 12 months. Once Rossinskaya had spent a full year in pretrial detention, new, more severe charges were brought against her: treason and aiding terrorist activity. “At that point, investigators had a choice: either release her or submit the financial transfers as evidence. Once they chose the second option, there was no turning back — they had to send the case to trial,” said her lawyer, Anton Prisny. “Given the current situation in the country, an acquittal just wasn’t an option.”

Rossinskaya’s mother, Yevgenia Yusupova, told Bereg that both she and Nadezhda were repeatedly threatened by an FSB officer during the investigation. In June 2024, the newspaper Kommersant, citing the FSB, published transcripts of voice messages in which Rossinskaya allegedly talked about wanting to get Ukrainian citizenship and wondering how she might move to Ukraine. The article quoted a fragment of Rossinskaya’s purported message:

My story is literally the story of a girl who batted her eyelashes, outsmarted the whole system, smuggled ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operation] fighters and Ukrainian Armed Forces coordinators right under the FSB’s nose, hid them in her warehouse, in her home, and sent donations to the Armed Forces. But I can’t tell anyone that.

After another outlet, Otkryty Belgorod, also published the same voice messages, the FSB officer began pressuring Rossinskaya’s mother and stepfather, demanding they convince her to confess. He warned them that if she didn’t cooperate, there’d be “the sound of breaking bones — and not just Nadezhda’s.” This same officer had previously called Iryna Pereborshchykova as well.

“When he was interrogating Nadezhda in the first few days, he flat-out told her, ‘You realize I could snap your neck like a chicken’s right now and nothing would happen to me?’” Yusupova said, recalling her daughter’s words. “Right in front of us, he threatened Nadezhda, saying he’d crush her and she’d pay for everything. And to me, he leaned in and said, ‘What about you, Mom — are you her handler? Is she doing all this on your orders?’”

According to Yusupova, the FSB also intimidated journalists covering Rossinskaya’s trial. “There was a local journalist who came to every hearing — a nice young woman. We got to know each other and chatted in the hallway before court sessions,” Yusupova said. “Then one day she just vanished. My husband, Sergey [Rossinskaya’s stepfather], called her and said, ‘Hey, where’d you go? There’s another hearing tomorrow.’ And she just said, ‘Sorry, I can’t,’ and that was it.” Yusupova said the same FSB officer threatened the journalist with arrest, though Bereg was unable to independently confirm this.

Rossinskaya’s family is currently raising money to pay off her 320,000-ruble ($4,100) fine.

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In October 2022, several Russian and Ukrainian volunteers, speaking anonymously, told Mediazona that they suspected Rossinskaya of having ties to the FSB. They noted that Russian troops allowed members of the Army of Beauties to enter occupied territories even when pro-war activists were going missing there.

Rossinskaya denied the accusations, saying she must have “gotten in someone’s way.” After her sentencing, feminist activist Daria Serenko wrote on Twitter:

I’m deeply ashamed that two years ago I gave in to the conspiracy panic about Nadine and her Army of Beauties possibly being connected to the cops or “shady” in some way. It doesn’t matter that I heard it from 20 different people — including some Ukrainian activists and Russian journalists. I think we all lost our minds back then and we were wrong. And honestly, things always seem “shady” when the work is that dangerous — because you just can’t talk openly about half of it.