A 23-year-old man from Reading left the UK to meet his online girlfriend in Georgia, but was allegedly seized by Russian authorities and tortured into confessing that he had spied for Ukraine.
David Adrian Kercso was sentenced to 15 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges in March.
His family, however, says he travelled to Eastern Europe for a relationship with a woman he had met on the internet.
Kercso was employed by an electronics recycling company in 2023 when he began communicating with a Georgian woman named Valeria.
The pair developed an online romance, and his family says he travelled through Turkey in August 2024 to meet her in person.
Kercso told relatives that they met in Sochi, Russia, before crossing into Abkhazia a few days later. The Romanian national remained there throughout the autumn.
According to his mother, the relationship later deteriorated as Kercso began running out of money. He then told his family he intended to return home.
His journey back to the UK was scheduled for November 28, 2024, but he never arrived. He stopped responding to calls and messages that day. In later letters sent from prison, Kercso said he had been arrested in Abkhazia, a Georgian territory controlled by separatists.
David Adrian Kercso (pictured) was sentenced to 15 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges
Footage released by Russia’s FSB security service purportedly shows his arrest
The Abkhazian separatist authorities first announced Kercso’s arrest two weeks later. On December 13, they released footage appearing to show their SGB security service escorting him from a car into a building.
In the video, he appeared to confess to having contact with Ukrainian intelligence and to being instructed to use a drone to film Abkhazian military sites.
Kercso later wrote that the confession filmed in Abkhazia was based on a statement his captors had forced him to memorise. He said they promised to send him home if he repeated it on camera.
Instead, he said, he was taken to the border and handed over to Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.
The day after the Abkhazian video was released, Kercso was in Russian custody and appeared before a judge at Sochi’s Khostinsky District Court on December 14, according to court records available online.
That hearing began a sequence of 10 court appearances over the following four months. At each one, his detention in Russia was extended by roughly two weeks.
In his letters, Kercso claimed the Russian video of his supposed arrest was staged in Sochi in mid-April—around four months after he had allegedly been captured in Abkhazia, transferred to Russia and held there.
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He said FSB officers woke him near dawn in prison and took him to a nearby location so the footage could be recorded.
The video shows Kercso wearing a blue knitted hat and carrying an Adidas backpack as he walks along a path.
Two heavily built security agents then emerge from a van and force him face down onto the pavement.
‘What is your name?’ asks a voice in English as a gloved hand holds the man’s face towards the camera.
‘David Adrian Kercso,’ he swiftly responds, and tells them he is from Romania.
Reuters analysis of the video and of court records of his detention shows that at the time the video was made, he had already been in Russian custody for months.
Kercso appears in a Russian court following his arrest
Though the exact date cannot be established, ample green foliage is clearly visible, showing it was filmed after the start of spring, and could not have been filmed before he began the four months of detention documented in his 10 Sochi court appearances since December.
The location – a strip of parkland along Sochi’s Matsesta River – can be established from visible features. These include the pathway layout, a bridge pillar, lamp posts, trees, a grassy strip and a wall, all of which match archive and satellite imagery of the area.
Evgeny Smirnov, a Russian lawyer familiar with the case, said it was common for the FSB to compel suspects to film dramatic arrest scenes long after they are detained.
‘We have seen this in dozens of cases where individuals detained months earlier are taken to a city street, a forest, or a train station so that a staged arrest video can be filmed,’ he said.
Kercso says in his letters that in the months following his transfer to Russia he was beaten, held in isolation and tortured. Reuters could not independently verify those allegations.
When he was sentenced, the FSB said he had transmitted the location of Russian air-defence systems in Sochi to a Ukrainian intelligence agency in the summer of 2024. Video released by the agency showed him confessing to that charge.
Kercso says that confession was also coerced.
‘None of that happened, they stole my life for no reason and fabricated everything,’ he wrote. He has learned Russian in prison, misses his family deeply and dreams of returning home.
‘Now I know that coming here was a huge mistake,’ he said. ‘I was blinded by love and didn’t see the warning signs.’