In January 2026, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) arrested Belarusian journalist Ina Kardash in Kyiv. She faces up to 15 years in prison on charges of spying for the KGB and denies the allegations. In covert footage, Kardash is seen urging a man whose face is not visible to “cooperate”. The Ukrainian television channel TSN, citing Ukrainian intelligence services, reported that the man was a “combat unit commander” whom Kardash had allegedly recruited using sex, and that in messages to her KGB handler she called him “my sucker”. In fact, the man in the video is her husband, Siarhei A. (his surname is being withheld at his request). He is Belarusian, served in the International Legion fighting for Ukraine, describes the TSN report as nonsense, believes his wife is innocent and wants to draw attention to the deterioration of her health in custody.
Siarhei is sitting in a room with unfinished walls and shows a marriage certificate (a copy of which is in Reform.news’s possession). The creases in the paper are more visible in the video than the letters and stamps: the document was crumpled into a ball, then carefully smoothed out and placed in a plastic sleeve. “I carried it with me to the front line, and then… well, it was an accident,” he replies, laughing off the suggestion that he crumpled the certificate in a fit of emotion.
With the assistance of the BelPol initiative, Reform.news established that Siarhei is listed in the “Riots” database, maintained by Belarusian law enforcement agencies and containing information about protest participants. He says he took part in the 2020 protests in his hometown of Kobryn and was detained several times, but received only fines and short jail terms. At the same time, he has a profile on the luka.zone website, which claims that he allegedly attended protest marches “undercover”. He believes the entry was made by security officers — “it’s standard practice” — and says that afterwards “people started avoiding me”.
The man says he left Kobryn for Ukraine in 2022 to fight for its independence as part of a Belarusian military formation, later transferring to another unit of the International Legion.
The SBU’s statements did not mention Kardash’s husband. UNIAN referred to him as a “fighter in the International Legion”, while TSN described Siarhei as a commander and veteran who “did not turn Ina in because he fell in love”.
Siarhei himself says he never commanded anyone. He also describes the entire TSN report about an alluring female spy who “made sex her main weapon” as nonsense and says he intends to sue the channel. However, his wife’s lawyer does not handle such cases.
He began living with Ina in 2024, and they married in March 2025.
Later, according to Siarhei after his wife complained that the SBU was “giving her no peace” and persistently pressuring her to cooperate, he helped Ina get a media-related job in his unit under a contract, with a salary and no deployment to combat positions. Kardash learned video editing there, but decided to resign after a conflict with a fellow service member. Both submitted their resignation reports in early September, but Siarhei was not discharged until just before New Year, with the help of a lawyer. He is now in Ukraine without legal status.
Asked whether he was afraid of being deported to Belarus, he replied: “Well, let that be on their conscience if they do it. I don’t rule it out, but logically, why would they want to cause unnecessary publicity? Most likely, they would simply take me somewhere in the direction of Poland.”
According to the case materials, in November 2025 Kardash took a job at the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War on the instructions of the Belarusian KGB. She worked there from November 21 to December 19, allegedly photographing official documents and recording colleagues at the direction of her handlers in Belarus.
“She was offered a position not at the Coordination Headquarters itself,” Siarhei explains. “She worked with a blogger associated with the Coordination Headquarters. It was their unofficial project; he was neither under contract nor part of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU).” To support his account, he cites a response from the DIU stating that Ina had never worked for the agency.
Although the prosecutor told the court, according to Suspilne, that Kardash had been “dismissed from the DIU”, and Radio Svaboda reported that at the time of her arrest she was “a service member holding the rank of private”. However, the SBU itself never made such a claim: formally, the Coordination Headquarters is not a unit of the DIU. Bohdan Okhrimenko, head of the Coordination Headquarters’ secretariat, said that her position had been “specially created” as part of an “operational game”.
There is no contradiction in the discrepancy Siarhei appears to be pointing to: someone being targeted in an operational operation would hardly be formally employed by the intelligence agency and granted security clearance. Instead, they would be placed nearby and given false documents. Thus, the DIU certificate does not contradict the allegations; rather, it illustrates how the operation was organised.
In the SBU video, Kardash tells her husband: “Do you want to explain to me, someone with ten years of experience in the security services, how this works? Do you want to teach me something? I don’t think you should… You were told what it was, how it worked and everything else. And nobody is forcing you to do anything. At all. For me, this is f***ing good… If you don’t want to, then don’t. This is not the KGB. This is something much higher. Nobody else in this life will ever touch me… Nobody will touch you. This is simply under all kinds of guarantees, including my personal guarantees, and so on.” Siarhei replies: “That’s not how it works. And with your ten years of experience, you should have understood that by now.”
The SBU claims this is a recruitment scene: Kardash is persuading a member of Ukraine’s Defence Forces to work for the KGB. Siarhei says that he and his wife had been drinking gin and arguing about leaving the country. He was torn between an offer from another military unit and the prospect of emigrating, while she was upset and “was turning down a good job because of him”. He says they suspected they were being filmed: “The SBU had come to the apartment several times while we were away.” That evening, he adds, a former fellow service member “showed up spontaneously”. After the arrest, the same man invited him for a drink and asked “leading questions about the case”.
Asked where they had planned to go, Siarhei gives a vague answer. He was considering Mexico, while Ina wanted to launch her own Russian-language news website and did not care where she was based. Did they resign without deciding where to go? “Well, yes.” In February, however, her lawyer told the court the opposite: Kardash was “not planning to flee” and had no visas in her passport.
He explains the phrase “Nobody will touch you” by referring to his fears. Without a visa, they would have had to leave through Moldova or Georgia, where Belarusian security services might have “picked him up”. “She told me: don’t panic,” he says. Siarhei was unable to explain Kardash’s remark, “This is not the KGB — this is something much higher.” He says it is “unpleasant to watch the recording again” and that he does not know “what she meant; there were many job offers coming in”.
The claim about “ten years of experience in the security services” is the most difficult to reconcile. Siarhei says Ina had access to the Presidential Administration on Bankova Street in Kyiv and that “the [Ukrainian intelligence] services asked her to ask questions on specific topics”. But when asked directly which services he meant and what the ten years of experience referred to, Siarhei could not answer.
The “ten years of experience” claim also does not match the prosecution’s own documents. In an SBU press release, Kardash is said to have “worked for the KGB since 2015”. However, the text of the suspicion notice cited by Suspilne and Radio Svaboda dates her alleged recruitment to September 2025, during a “confidential conversation” in Budapest. Her alleged involvement from 2019 onwards is limited to “regular contacts” with a Belarusian who cooperated with the security services.
After Ina’s arrest at a restaurant, Siarhei says he was unofficially held for a week in a “safe house — a hotel room”. One option discussed was to put a “bag over his head and take him to an island on the Dnipro”, but, according to what his guards told him, the DIU “intervened on his behalf”.
He says he was pressured over an explosive charge found during a search: “If you don’t talk, you’ll be charged with possession.” The charge is indeed mentioned in the case materials cited by Suspilne. According to Siarhei, a prosecutor confirmed in a private conversation that the SBU had asked for charges to be brought against him, but the prosecution refused: “A disgrace. A veteran.”
The only specific lead investigators were allegedly pursuing through him had nothing to do with the Coordination Headquarters. “At every interrogation, they kept asking: do you know someone called Sharoyko? Did Ina ever say anything about him?” Siarhei did not know.
Pavlo Sharoyko, a correspondent for Ukrainian Radio, was convicted of espionage in Minsk in 2018 in a case that Belarusian media described as a KGB provocation. Reform.news previously reported that cameraman Vasil Siamashka was involved in the case. He had been in a relationship with Kardash and worked with her professionally in Minsk. Siamashka himself was an instrument of the provocation: he handed Sharoyko an “allegedly secret document”, for which the Ukrainian journalist received an eight-year prison sentence on espionage charges. If the SBU repeatedly asks Kardash’s husband about Sharoyko, it would appear to be checking whether Ina was involved in that earlier case and whether she did something similar in Ukraine.
Siarhei is not listed as a witness in the case: his wife’s lawyer warned that this would result in him being denied visits. He considers the charge itself absurd: “She had no access to state secrets. It is impossible for a Belarusian to obtain it.”
Why would the SBU pursue the case if Ina is not a spy? “A combination of reasons,” Siarhei replies: her refusal to “cooperate with their cunning assignments”, the publicity surrounding the case, hopes of securing her confession and making him “give in”, as well as a possible prisoner exchange. “You can’t exchange a Belarusian who is fighting for Ukraine for one of their own, but a journalist whose case has attracted this much attention is a different matter.”
According to Okhrimenko, Minsk did indeed request that Kardash be included in a prisoner exchange. Siarhei does not consider this evidence of her guilt: “Any normal state is obliged to provide assistance and support to its citizens.” In the same statement, Belarus is described both as a “normal state” when he discusses the possible exchange of his wife, and as a “regime” with political prisoners when he compares it with Ukraine: “There are even more people here who could be recognised as political prisoners than in Belarus… In fact, the regime here is exactly the same, only there is much more corruption and nepotism.”
The main reason Siarhei came forward was concern about his wife’s health: spinal hernias and weight loss. According to him, she has lost more than 10 kilograms while in custody. He says he has repeatedly contacted Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets and the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War regarding his wife’s health and a possible exchange, but has received no substantive responses.
“I’m not afraid for myself, but I am worried about her. That’s why I’m writing to you: her health is getting worse, and the conditions leave much to be desired. Whoever I write to here, nobody seems to care. And these are the very institutions that are supposed to monitor respect for human rights,” Siarhei says.
In March, Kardash herself shouted at a prosecutor that she would be “killed” in the pre-trial detention centre, but specific complaints about her detention conditions have not appeared in the media. “The food is not particularly good, there’s stress, and she also has tachycardia,” Siarhei says when asked about the causes of her health problems.
The defence requested that Kardash be released on bail, but the prosecutor argued that she “could influence witnesses and flee”, Siarhei says. He is hoping for a prisoner exchange and refers to Law No. 2472-IX, which does not require a conviction for an exchange to take place.
“I still don’t understand whether a possible exchange is being considered, what steps are being taken, or why, during a personal appointment, I was told that a confession or a court verdict was necessary.”
Kardash’s detention has been extended repeatedly since January. Two district courts were unable to assemble a panel of judges with security clearance for state secrets, and the Pechersky District Court has still not begun hearing the case. Siarhei says that on October 6 the prosecutor finally read out the charges; the next hearing is scheduled for November 12. Whether Ina will remain in Ukraine until a verdict is delivered, and what she herself will say about the “ten years of experience”, will not become clear any earlier.