The timeline of Romanian David Adrian Kercso's 15-year espionage case is contested after Reuters reported that FSB footage of his arrest was filmed months after his first Sochi court appearance.
On March 5, 2026, the Krasnodar Regional Court imposed a 15-year sentence in a strict-regime penal colony for espionage. The court said Kercso approached a Ukrainian military intelligence officer in November 2024, who offered help with leaving Russia in exchange for military information. The court alleged that Kercso used a drone on Nov. 12 to obtain and transmit coordinates and related details about a Sochi air-defense system. The court press service gives his name as Adrian-David Kercho.
Abkhazia's State Security Service (SGB) described a different alleged activity. It said an operation on Dec. 10, 2024, stopped an effort to recruit Kercso to collect information on military sites in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, including by filming them with a drone. The SGB did not say he had gathered information there. On Dec. 16, an SGB official told TASS that Kercso had cooperated with investigators, committed no illegal acts in Abkhazia and was deported.
In a statement carried by TASS on April 25, 2025, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had detained an unnamed Romanian citizen born in 2002 in Sochi. The FSB said the man sent Ukrainian services information about Sochi air-defense locations collected in summer 2024. The court later dated the alleged transfer to Nov. 12, 2024.
Records reviewed by Reuters place Kercso's first appearance before a judge at Sochi's Khostinsky District Court on Dec. 14, 2024. The records show 10 appearances over the next four months, as his detention was extended roughly every two weeks. Reuters placed the FSB video months later at a park along the Matsesta River; it could not establish the recording date. Lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told Reuters that, in other cases, people held for months had been taken to public places for arrest footage. Reuters did not establish that this happened in Kercso's case.
Kercso's family told Reuters he lived in Reading, England, and traveled through Turkey in August 2024 to meet a woman he had met online. Reuters reported that he later wrote to his family that he was arrested in Abkhazia on Nov. 28, the day he planned to return home. Reuters quoted a letter in which Kercso wrote, “Now I know that coming here was a huge mistake.”
Reuters also reported that Kercso disputed his confession and alleged in letters that he was beaten, isolated and tortured. Reuters said it could not independently verify those allegations. The FSB did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on why the video portrayed an arrest after Kercso had been in custody for months. The Third Appellate Court's listing records a hearing on June 18, 2026; Memorial's case profile lists the judgment as in force.
