A programmer who was traveling from Europe to St. Petersburg to visit his sick father was sentenced to 16 years in prison for transferring money to his ex-girlfriend from Ukraine

The Pskov Regional Court sentenced programmer Mikhail Loshchinin to 16 years in prison in a treason case, reported “Caution News” with reference to its correspondent.

In the summer of 2025, Loshchinin traveled by motorcycle from Germany to St. Petersburg to visit his father, who had undergone two heart surgeries - the programmer himself had not lived in Russia since 2000; he also has Belgian citizenship.

On July 1, Loshchinin was stopped at the border of Latvia and Russia. FSB officers found correspondence on his phone with an ex-girlfriend from Ukraine.

Under the pretext of illegally crossing the border zone, the programmer was detained and arrested for two weeks, placed at his own expense in a hotel in the Pskov border city of Pytalovo, his support group reported in a telegram.

“During this period, border guards discovered personal correspondence between Mikhail and his ex-girlfriend, with whom he had a close relationship in 2021. She asked him for financial assistance, and the correspondence continued from July to October 2022. After October 2022, Mikhail no longer had contact with this woman,” the group’s message said.

Correspondence from Loshchinin’s phone became the basis for initiating a case of treason. Officially, he was accused of transferring 18 thousand rubles, which the investigation considered “assistance to a foreign state against the Russian Armed Forces.”

“The funds were credited to the bank account of a foreign military personnel in order to finance her purchase of uniforms for direct participation in hostilities against Russian military personnel,” the Pskov region prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

From the Pskov region, Loshchinin was sent to pre-trial detention center-2 in the Belgorod region, where captured Ukrainians are kept. In the detention center, the man, according to him, was subjected to violence and torture. Towards the end of August, Loshchinin was transferred to Pskov pre-trial detention center-1.

“They took my glasses, and with my myopia of -8.5, everything more than five centimeters from my eyes is blurry. The only things that remain clear in my memory are the needles and the discharge of the stun gun that the commando shoved into my face. <...> Psychological and physical torture occurred on a daily basis. This is a world where you are no longer human. Where, being in a cell, with the door closed and silence in the corridor, you are happy. Where hell comes with every door that opens. And the door opened often,” he said in an interview with Bereg.