Kazakh authorities have released Ukrainian citizen Liubov Rozhanska, who had been detained in the country at Russia’s request during a trip to return her grandson to Ukraine. The independent outlet Vot Tak reported, citing Rozhanska’s lawyer Alexei Pryanishnikov, that the Ukrainian grandmother was released from a Kazakh detention facility on Oct. 4. Rozhanska then spent several days at the Ukrainian Embassy in Astana before leaving for Odesa.
“The detention period expired. Since no pretrial restriction was imposed, she was released from the detention facility. She has left Kazakhstan. The Kazakh side acted in accordance with the law,” Pryanishnikov said.
Rozhanska was detained on Oct. 1 at Astana airport after arriving from Istanbul. The Ukrainian woman had traveled there to collect her 8-year-old grandson, who is on Ukraine’s list of children who are being unlawfully held in Russia. The boy, however, was never brought to Kazakhstan. Instead, according to the lawyer Pryanishnikov, a staged video was made by the Russian side in order to create the appearance that the boy was departing from Kaliningrad to Kazakhstan in advance of the arranged meeting. Pryanishnikov believes the episode was an FSB operation.
Rozhanska’s grandson was taken to Russia by his mother in 2021 after she married a Russian citizen. The boy’s Ukrainian father had given his permission for a temporary trip, but the mother never returned to Ukraine. In 2022 both she and the boy received Russian citizenship. The father went to a Ukrainian court, which ruled that the boy should live with him. According to Pryanishnikov, that ruling provides a legal basis for returning the child to Ukraine.
At the same time, a separate case over the father’s contact with the boy was heard in Kaliningrad, where the child lives with his mother. “In the end, a court in Kaliningrad issued a ruling allowing the father, who serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to have in-person contact with his son during the summer holidays on the territory of the Kaliningrad Region,” Pryanishnikov told The Insider on Oct. 2.
The boy had already been promised to be returned to Ukraine in 2023, and two Ukrainian citizens traveled to the Kaliningrad Region to pick him up.
“But those people were detained and accused of attempting to abduct the child, and then they were hit with espionage charges as well. They were put under heavy pressure there, forced to give up their lawyers and sentenced to 15 and 16 years in prison. At the same time, Rozhanska, who was detained in Kazakhstan, was declared by a Russian court to be the organizer of the ‘abduction’ — although charging a grandmother with trying to abduct her own grandson is very strange,” the lawyer said.
