South African Chris van Heerden was once the welterweight boxing champion of the world. But now he is engaged in a much bigger fight: to try to free his girlfriend from a Russian jail.
On Wednesday this week, Chris van Heerden's girlfriend, Ksenia Karelina, a dual Russian-American citizen, will go on trial in Yekaterinburg, Russia, for treason. Her "crime" was to donate $51.80 in 2022 to a charity helping old people and children affected by the war in Ukraine.
Van Heerden (36), Meyerton born and bred but now living and fighting in Los Angeles, put Karelina on a plane to Russia on 2 January 2024 to visit her family there. He was nervous but she was not. His fears proved well founded for she was arrested on arrival at the airport in Yekaterinburg and first charged, bizarrely, with "hooliganism" and then, much more seriously, with treason.
I'm just a guy that grew up in Meyerton. I don't know what I'm doing but I'm trying my best.
Van Heerden is praying she will be acquitted. But more realistically he is bracing himself for her to be convicted and given a long sentence. Then he will resume his political struggle to try to get her freed in a prisoner swap like the big one which took place between the US and Russia last Wednesday....
