Cristi and Denis, two Romanian vloggers who traveled through Russia and praised the country in several videos, say they ended up in the hands of the FSB. The couple was declared undesirable by the Kremlin authorities for 50 years.
This was the vloggers’ second visit to Russia. The two had made several videos on their previous journey, and now they planned to explore Siberia, according to adevarul.ro. The Russian authorities considered them spies.
“Officially we are criminals for the Russians and for Russia. So they stripped us, me just in underwear, in boxers, and my wife in panties and bra,” Cristi recounted.
The young people had visas. They arrived in the city of Harbin in China, but when they took the flight to Vladivostok, problems began at the Russian immigration office.
“The idea is that they took us one by one. They took my passport too, they took me to the same room. We give you the same questions that we both received: why were we in Ukraine twice? Why did we come to Russia? They were more interested in why we had been in Ukraine. And at the same time, they were interested in why we come from Romania, from France, plus as vloggers to visit Russia. Here in Vladivostok, unfortunately, that officer was quite arrogant and had a colleague who laughed every time we gave information. She laughed as if: “Ha, these fools are surely lying, they surely came with other motives”. At one point they even said that we are pro-Ukrainian and we came to Russia somehow with other purposes,” Denis recounted.
The young people also report that FSB agents took their fingerprints and oral prints, as well as mouth swabs. They were deprived of their phones, had no access to water and food, and the woman was taken to the same room with several men. Their phones were examined, and the video cameras – seized and checked.
“My wife and I went in with the men. There were two armored doors. All our phones were with the officers, in a box under a bench. You were not allowed to leave that jail at all. They came to tell us that we were going to buy plane tickets. Tickets chosen by them, of course. There were two options: either to Thailand or to China. But you don’t choose, they choose for you. I went with an officer to the cashier. I paid about 250 dollars for the two tickets. Everything was paid cash in rubles, so we also lost at the currency exchange. After we bought the tickets, we returned to jail. They came back to tell us that, in fact, that flight to Harbin is no longer possible. The most pathetic excuse: they said that if they sent us back to Harbin, we in China were rejected by the Chinese and returned to Russia where we were arrested for many years,” Cristi recounted.
The madness continued in the following hours, with misunderstandings about the city they had to fly to after expulsion. The Russian officials would have forced the Romanians to buy tickets to Harbin, then they communicated that the planned flight will not be performed. As a result, the young people took other tickets to Beijing, so they could finally leave Russia.
“This experience does not change our opinion about the Russians we met the first time, but the second time the authorities were some garbage, aggressive, they abused their power”, Denisa said.
Cristi and Denisa believe that everything happened because the Russians are blinded by hatred towards Ukrainians and NATO.