A 23-year-old man who lived in Reading has been sentenced to 15 years in a Russian prison after being convicted of espionage, with his family saying he travelled to Eastern Europe to meet a woman he had met online.
David Adrian Kercso, a Romanian national, was working for an electronics recycling company in 2023 when he began communicating with a Georgian woman named Valeria.
The online relationship developed into a romance, and Kercso travelled via Turkey in August 2024 to meet her, according to his family’s account.
Kercso later told relatives that they met in the Russian city of Sochi before crossing into Abkhazia, a Georgian territory controlled by separatist authorities. He remained there through the autumn.
His mother said the relationship subsequently deteriorated as he began running out of money. Kercso told his family he intended to return to the UK.
Planned Return to Britain Never Happened
Kercso was due to travel back to the UK on November 28, 2024, but he never arrived. On that day, he stopped responding to calls and messages from his family.
In letters sent from prison, he later told relatives that he had been arrested in Abkhazia on the same date.
The first public announcement of his detention came from Abkhazian separatist authorities about two weeks later. On December 13, they released footage showing members of their security service, known as the SGB, escorting Kercso from a car into a building.
The video showed him confessing that he had been in contact with Ukrainian intelligence and had been instructed to use a drone to film military sites in Abkhazia.
Kercso Says Initial Confession Was Forced
In letters to his family, Kercso claimed that the confession shown in the Abkhazian video was based on a statement his captors had ordered him to memorise.
He said he was told that reciting the text on camera would result in his release and return home.
However, according to his account, he was instead taken to the border and handed over to Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB.
Court records show that Kercso appeared before Sochi’s Khostinsky District Court on December 14, 2024, the day after the Abkhazian authorities released their video.
Over the following four months, 10 court appearances were recorded, with his detention in Russia extended approximately every two weeks.
Russian Arrest Video Appears to Have Been Filmed Months Later
Footage released by Russia’s FSB purported to show Kercso being arrested by security agents in a dramatic operation.
The video shows him wearing a blue knitted hat and carrying an Adidas backpack as he walks along a path. Two agents emerge from a van and force him to the ground.
A voice speaking English asks for his name, and Kercso identifies himself as David Adrian Kercso and says he is from Romania.
However, a Reuters analysis of the footage and available court records indicated that the video was filmed months after his initial detention.
Kercso wrote to his family that FSB officers woke him around dawn in mid-April and took him from prison to a nearby location in Sochi to stage the arrest scene.
The precise filming date could not be established, but the green foliage visible in the footage indicated that it was recorded after the beginning of spring. That would place it after the four months of detention documented in court records.
The location was identified as a stretch of parkland beside Sochi’s Matsesta River. Features visible in the video, including the path, bridge pillar, lamp posts, trees, grass and a wall, matched archived and satellite images of the area.
Lawyer Says Staged Arrest Videos Have Been Used Before
Russian lawyer Evgeny Smirnov, who is familiar with the case, said the FSB had previously made suspects appear in staged arrest videos long after they were 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 also alleged in his letters that he was beaten, kept in isolation and tortured during the months after being transferred to Russia.
Reuters said it could not independently verify those allegations.
FSB Accused Kercso of Passing Air Defence Locations to Ukraine
When Kercso was sentenced in March, Russia’s FSB said he had transmitted the locations of Russian air-defence systems in Sochi to a Ukrainian intelligence agency during the summer of 2024.
The security service released video footage showing Kercso confessing to the alleged espionage.
Kercso maintained that this confession, like the earlier statement recorded in Abkhazia, had been obtained under coercion.
“None of that happened, they stole my life for no reason and fabricated everything,” he wrote in a letter to his family.
He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years in prison on espionage charges.
Prisoner Says He Regrets Travelling to Eastern Europe
Kercso has been learning Russian while in prison and has told his family that he misses them deeply and hopes to return home.
Reflecting on his decision to travel to meet Valeria, he said he had failed to recognise the risks involved in pursuing the relationship.
“Now I know that coming here was a huge mistake,” he wrote. “I was blinded by love and didn’t see the warning signs.”
