US-Russian ballerina reflects on release from Russian penal colony after year-long ordeal

An American ballerina imprisoned in Russia for more than one year has opened up about her agonizing ordeal and how President Trump gave her a "warm" welcome upon her return home.

Karelina was detained in Jan. 2024 when she had traveled to Russia, her home country, to visit her family. The ballerina, who worked as an esthetician at a Los Angeles spa, had been accused of treason over a 2022 donation totaling $51.80 that she made to a U.S. charity supporting victims of the war in Ukraine. She was sentenced to 12 years in a Russian labor camp. 

"Right when I landed in my homeland, that's when everything started. I was going through border control for the paperwork check. They asked if I had another passport. I said that I do, and they asked for the passport, and they saw the other passport is an American passport. They took both documents, and they say they're going to talk with me separate, and it was 11 hours of the first examination overnight," Karelina said. 

Karelina shared that Russian authorities told her she was facing a lifetime sentence over the so-called "treason." The dual national said that, at first, the whole experience was surreal to her. 

"You don't really realize it could be real," Karelina said. "You can imagine about prison just watching the movies or something, it's that, but more."

The ballerina said her parents were patriotic citizens of Russia, as she was as well, and it was devastating to her family that the country that they loved captured their own daughter. 

She told Lara Trump that her family had to focus on supporting each other in order to survive the ordeal. Karelina said she drew inspiration from a book about a saint who survived in the desert in order to endure the endless days trapped inside the walls of her prison cell.

"You just need to survive somehow, and you just drag day to day… I had this phrase in my head… 'Just one more step, just do one more step, just one more step,' and that's how you drag through this, at first especially," she said. 

Karelina said she and her boyfriend, Chris Van Heerden, wrote letters back and forth throughout her ordeal in the penal colony. She said he was her "hero" who never stopped fighting for her. The ballerina said that Van Heerden never expressed any doubt that she would be freed. 

"People shouldn't die with no reason. I really hope everything's going to be peaceful soon."