It could be the making of a fairytale – a love story about a ballerina and a boxer. Instead, it turned into a nightmare. The amateur ballerina Ksenia Karelina, an American and Russian dual citizen who celebrated the new year with a trip to Istanbul with her partner Chris van Heerden, a South African professional boxer, before heading to Russia to visit family, was arrested and detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) on 28 January in her hometown of Yekaterinburg, about 1,100 miles east of Moscow.
Karelina may be the latest victim in a chess match over detainees between the US and Russia, which dates back more than 15 years when, in 2008, the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Viktor Bout, a former Soviet military officer and translator, on conspiracy charges. Bout was eventually traded in 2022 for the WNBA champion Brittney Griner, who Russian officials had arrested for possessing vaporizer cartridges containing less than a gram of hash oil.
