What the footage shows

A video released by Russia's FSB security service and carried by state media is meant to show the arrest of David Adrian Kercso, a 23-year-old Romanian citizen raised in England. In the footage, a young man in a blue knitted hat and an Adidas backpack walks along a park path before two agents leap from a van and pin him to the pavement. An English-speaking voice asks for his name, and he replies with his full name and says he is from Romania. Reuters, after reviewing the video and the judicial documents in the case, reports that the recording does not show the real arrest. Its analysis indicates that Kercso had already been held by Russian authorities for several months when the footage was shot. Reuters says it could not verify all of the evidence against him, but it is clear to the agency that the clip does not depict what it claims. The FSB has not answered questions about why it would publish an arrest video of a man who was already in custody.

Arrest first announced in Abkhazia

The footage was filmed in a park in the southern Russian city of Sochi. News of his detention, however, first came from pro-Russian separatists in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of neighbouring Georgia. Those authorities published their own footage of him in custody a day before he made his first appearance before a Russian court. Reuters sent comment requests to the SGB security agency of the Abkhazian separatists, the Russian embassy in London, and the foreign ministries of Romania and Ukraine. None of them responded to the agency, and the FSB also left its questions unanswered.

From Reading to the Black Sea

In late 2023 Kercso was living in the English city of Reading, where he worked for a company that recycles electronic equipment. There he first got in touch online with a woman called Valeria, who came from Abkhazia. According to his family, the relationship grew gradually, and in August 2024 he travelled through Turkey to meet her. Relatives say the pair first met in Sochi and then crossed the border into Abkhazia, where he stayed through the autumn. The family also says the relationship soured after he ran out of money, and that he had told them he planned to come home on 28 November 2024, a date he never reached.

Family account and appeal

For his family, who say he was lured to the Black Sea coast by a romance, the FSB clip is simply the latest strange twist in a story that alarmed them from the start. His mother, Julia Kercso, told Reuters that she had warned him against going to the region because of the war.

“I told him to not go there because it's very dangerous, because it's a war.”

She said her son never listened to her. He was sentenced in 2026 to 15 years in prison for spying for Ukraine, and he hopes to lodge an appeal against the conviction.