Detained US-Russian ballerina Ksenia Karelina details horrific conditions at detention centre

Ksenia Karelina - detained while travelling to Russia from LA - paints a squalid picture of Russian detention centre. Inmates locked out for hours in cold.

Former semi-professional ballerina Ksenia Karelina is being held at the Yekaterinburg detention centre after being detained while travelling to Russia from LA. She'd allegedly donated $51 to a Ukrainian charity. Karelina, who holds dual American and Russian citizenship, has now painted a dreary picture of the horrific conditions that she was met with at the Russian detention centre. From being allowed access to showers once a week to being left outside during icy temperatures, the squalid conditions are bound to make your blood run cold.

A portrait of Ksenia Karelina, U.S, December 13, 2015. Eleonora Srebroski /Handout via REUTERS. (via REUTERS)

Karelina's boyfriend, Chris Van Heerden, further opened up to CNN how they'd been on vacation when Karelina started feeling homesick. While Heerden flew straight back to California from the Istanbul trip, she hoped to take a trip down memory lane in Russia. However, the January flight she took in nostalgically loving hopes landed her on an unexpected turn when she was detained. The 33-year-old is now an esthetician and works at a Californian spa. Here's what the American ballerina told her boyfriend about the detention entre - 870 miles east of Moscow:

Ksenia Karelina on Russian detention centre experience:

On Monday, Chris Van Heerden spoke to Fox & Friends (Fox News) First about a letter he'd received from his girlfriend. It shed ample amount of light on her experience at the detention centre and the living conditions provided to the inmates. Ksenia Karelina's day reportedly begins with a 6 am wake-up call and ends at 10 pm, when she's supposed to go to bed. Despite the underlined fixed bedtime, “the lights stay on all the time, so she's got trouble sleeping.”

Karelina is allowed access to fresh air through the jail's roof. However, that small window of mental escape has posed more dangers than imagined. There's a history of guards sometimes locking the door, leaving the inmates out during the icy cold temperatures for hours. Due to that new fear, she has decided to remain inside at all times instead.

In his February address, a former boxing champion, Van Heerden, told CNN that Karelina “had no fear, she was so proud to be going home… she’s so proud of Russia.” She was excited to meet her elderly grandparents in her Yekaterinburg hometown. However, that ultimately became the ground for her arrest when she was charged with ‘treason’.

She was initially detained only briefly, and Russian authorities had taken her phone. Although she was released soon, just as her US return date inched closer, the former boxing champion stopped hearing from Karelina. Presumably, she was arrested in Yekaterinburg at this point. Charged for treason, Russia's Federal Security Service (FBS) declared that she had been “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against Russia security."

According to the spa she worked at, she'd allegedly donated a mere amount of $51 to a Ukrainian charity. This went utterly against Van Heerden's claims about his girlfriend being “so proud to be Russian” and that “she doesn’t watch the news, she doesn’t intervene with anything," implying that she maintained a distance from the political warfare that had arisen with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. She could face 20 years in prison. On top of that, she's facing other hindrances due to the lack of legal representation, as lawyers are “afraid to just touch” her case. Van Heerden also informed that while a lawyer was willing to help her, they'd demanded “an insane amount of money.”

So far, Heerden has set up a GoFundMe page to help her with the issue and hopes the US will interject and bring her back safely.