Olha Shchekina worked with children: she performed in a puppet theatre, taught preschoolers and organised celebrations. After posting videos set to Ukrainian songs, she reported losing her jobs, receiving threats and facing persecution. Later, she described being tortured by Russian security officers. Now her whereabouts are unknown: on September 17, when she was due to be released after serving an administrative detention sentence in Russia, masked men took her away.
According to SOTAvision, citing human rights defenders, Shchekina was driven from a detention facility in Rostov-on-Don to an unknown location. It remains unclear who took her or on what grounds.
She had just served ten days of administrative detention imposed by Rostov-on-Don’s Leninsky District Court for petty hooliganism. Court documents alleged that she had used obscene language in a public place while intoxicated.
A trained educator, Shchekina told Mediazona in October 2023 that she had worked for a private touring puppet theatre, travelling with colleagues to perform for children in towns where schools and kindergartens were still operating. She also worked as a preschool teacher and organised children’s parties.
In spring 2023, she began posting TikTok videos set to Ukrainian songs, including “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” (“Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow”). After pro-Russian social media pages shared the clips, she began receiving threats. She said she lost all three of her jobs.
“I haven’t stayed silent since 2014, and everyone I know is aware of my [pro-Ukrainian] position,” Shchekina said.
Following the threats, she was afraid to leave home. She later changed her hairstyle and began wearing glasses to avoid being recognised. She said the experience also affected her daughter, who struggled to feel safe for a long time afterward.
That same year, a court in occupied Donetsk fined Shchekina a total of 77,000 rubles on charges of publicly calling for the violation of Russia’s territorial integrity and displaying prohibited symbols. The proceedings were linked to her social media videos. She was also forced to record a public apology.
In June 2024, Shchekina filmed the aftermath of a Ukrainian military strike on a building used by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, in occupied Donetsk. According to her account, two men subsequently detained her on the street, drove her to a forest and beat her, before torturing her with electric shocks in an unfamiliar apartment. They demanded that she confess to allegedly working for Ukrainian intelligence services.
Mediazona reported that she was released after three consecutive administrative detention sentences on charges of petty hooliganism and violating curfew. Attempts to force her to cooperate with the FSB nevertheless continued.
A human rights defender who provided Shchekina with legal assistance told SOTAvision that officers had threatened to fabricate evidence against her.
“Two FSB officers threatened to plant drugs on her or post ‘Glory to the Armed Forces of Ukraine!’ on her social media accounts,” she said.
In August 2025, Shchekina moved with her elderly mother and nine-year-old daughter to Berdiansk, a Russian-occupied city in southern Ukraine. In October that year, the family attempted to travel from Ukraine’s Donetsk region to Russia’s neighbouring Rostov region.
Shchekina was detained at a checkpoint and taken to a temporary accommodation facility in the Russian city of Taganrog. Her mother and daughter returned to Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine. The reports do not specify where the family had intended to travel next.
According to Mediazona, Shchekina had been held at the temporary accommodation facility since October 2025. On September 7, 2026, she was detained in Rostov-on-Don, although the circumstances of that detention remain unknown. She was due to be released after completing her court-ordered ten-day sentence.
There is still no information about where the masked men took her.
