Mikhail Loshchinin with his mother. Photo: Sever.Realii
A 48-year-old Russian man who also holds Belgian citizenship has been jailed on what his family and lawyers say is a fabricated treason charge after traveling to Russia to visit his ailing father, the independent outlet Sever.Realii reported. The basis for the accusation was a money transfer he made to a former girlfriend in Ukraine. The man, Mikhail Loshchinin, has been held in pretrial detention since mid-August and was tortured after his arrest, according to his relatives.
Loshchinin had lived in Europe since 1999. He traveled to St. Petersburg this past summer to see his father, who had recently suffered a heart attack. Loshchinin crossed the border from Latvia on July 1 on a motorcycle with German license plates. He presented a Russian passport at the checkpoint — which he had brought to avoid the need to procure a visa using his Belgian passport. Border guards inspected Loshchinin’s phone and, according to relatives, likely found many Ukrainian contacts; his sister is a Ukrainian citizen and he has many friends and acquaintances in the country.
Loshchinin’s mother, Olga, told Sever.Realii that border officials had no grounds to detain her son but staged a provocation instead: after completing the check, they suggested going to a shop to get water, led him into a restricted border zone, and then detained him for “illegally entering” it.
On July 4, Loshchinin called his mother from a Russian number and said he was being held under guard at a hotel in the town of Pytalovo in Russia’s Pskov Region, adding that FSB officers had confiscated his documents and phone. On Aug. 1, a lawyer hired by the family managed to see Loshchinin, but the next day authorities transferred him to Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Stary Oskol, in the Belgorod Region, where Ukrainian prisoners of war are held.
On Aug. 21, Loshchinin contacted his family again and said he had been moved to Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in Pskov, where he was being charged with treason — specifically, “financing representatives of a state that is an adversary of the Russian Federation.” According to his mother, border guards found messages on Loshchinin’s phone from 2022 in which his former girlfriend asked him for money. Her messenger avatar now displays Ukrainian symbols, although the image was not present at the time of their correspondence.
Loshchinin told his lawyer he had been tortured and abused while held in Stary Oskol: guards beat him, forced him to strip naked, and required him to walk with his head down. Officers also confiscated his eyeglasses — even though he has severe vision impairment of minus eight. Afterward, while in the Pskov detention center, he began experiencing retinal detachment.
Loshchinin’s mother believes the treason charge was “stretched to fit a peaceful and entirely innocent person.” Attorney Evgeny Smirnov of the human rights group Perviy Otdel (lit. “Department One”) told Sever.Realii that the FSB routinely treats money transfers to individuals in Ukraine as grounds for treason accusations. Smirnov said Loshchinin’s only real chance at release is through a prisoner swap, and that the likelihood would increase if the Belgian government becomes involved. According to the family, Belgian consular officials have already tried to visit Loshchinin in detention, but were denied access as Russia does not recognize his second citizenship.