Russian authorities have opened a criminal case against journalist and former television producer Kapitolina Averina on charges of publicly inciting terrorism. She has been held at a pretrial detention center in the Kaluga region since February 2026, according to Sever.Realii, a project of RFE/RL’s Russian service.

In recent years, Averina worked in entertainment media: on the show “Bez kompleksov” with Lolita Milyavskaya on the Russian state-controlled Channel One, which aired from 2005 to 2007; on the show “Beremenna po obmanu” on the channel Yu; as a producer on “Tayny Chapman” on REN TV; and making films for the channel Zvezda.

People who know Averina say that working for Russian television channels did not prevent her from holding opposition views. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she made her Facebook page private but continued for 4 years to repost anti-war content and write comments.

Averina was detained on February 5 in Ivangorod, a city in the Leningrad region on the border with Estonia, where she had traveled to visit her 71-year-old mother, Tatyana, according to sources who spoke to the outlet.

A friend of Tatyana Averina described the arrest:

It was in the morning, everyone was asleep. Kapa woke Tanya up and said: “Mom, someone’s knocking at the door, they say it’s the police.” She didn’t think much of it, because someone’s always coming around — checking the gas, the meters. She threw on a robe, opened the door — and there was the local beat officer. He said he needed to talk about the upstairs neighbor, something about complaints against her. She said she was surprised: “What complaints, she’s a perfectly normal person.” And at that moment people in masks just burst in. Just burst in. No warning. No pause. They were inside instantly, and the first thing they did was rip the phone out of Kapa’s hands.

After that, the friend said, security officials showed them the order opening the criminal case and began reading out comments that Kapitolina Averina had left online — about “bombing Moscow” and using a slur for Russians.

Sever.Realii also reports that in May 2023, Kapitolina Averina’s common-law husband, Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman Yuriy Stratiy, was killed near Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia region. The two had met 20 years earlier when Stratiy was visiting Moscow, according to people who knew them. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Stratiy went to the front.

“His death in May 2023 just broke Kapa. Tatyana was devastated too — she considered Yura part of the family. After that, Kapa kept saying: ‘I don’t want to live here. I hate all of this. They killed Yura.’ She became a different person after his death. It was as if everything inside her finally flipped. If before there were still some shades of gray, after that — no. Everything became black and white,” said Natalya, a friend of Tatyana Averina.

Kapitolina Averina appears on the list of terrorists and extremists maintained by Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service. Her name is marked with an asterisk (*), which the agency uses to designate those it considers involved in terrorist activity.