Father died for a Russian passport, son got 13 years in Russian prison. How the Ukraine war and an espionage case tore up one Moldovan family

The verdict spells his name as Yevgeny Chizhen which is apparently a direct transliteration of Cijen, the spelling in his Moldovan passport.

Chzhen is a Moldovan citizen of Korean descent who worked as a security guard in Chișinău. In February 2024 he set out to visit relatives in Russia, crossing at the Estonian border, where FSB officers detained him after inspecting his phone, his mother Olga Cijen told Mediazona.

Before he was arrested in the criminal case, Cijen was put through a series of “carousel arrests”, a common practice in which a person is jailed over and over again on a minuscule administrative charge, keeping them in custody until the investigators decide whether to press criminal charges. Starting February 27, 2024, the Pskov and Pechory district courts jailed him six times on “petty hooliganism” charges (Part 1 of Article 20.1 of the Code of Administrative Offences).

On May 23, 2024, the Pechory District Court fined Cijen 500 rubles (about $6) for a migration violation (Part 1 of Article 18.2 of the same code) and ordered his deportation, sending him to a temporary detention centre for foreign nationals in the Pskov region. He spent six months there. In November 2024, Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court ordered him held in pre-trial detention on the espionage charge.

Olga Cijen believes her son was set up. The case against him rests on him chatting over Telegram with a “person from Ukraine” whom she does not know, she says. She has no further details. As a child, she says, her son often stayed with his grandfather in Odesa, Ukraine, and he opposed Russia’s invasion. “And his father was killed in the war,” she says.

Yevgeny’s father, 46-year-old Andrei Cijen, also a Moldovan citizen, signed a contract with the Russian army in early 2024, his ex-wife Nelya Dumanskaya told Mediazona.

“He went [to the war] to earn money and sort out his papers,” she says. “Getting Russian citizenship and finding work was of critical importance for him.”

Three months after signing the contract, Andrei Cijen was killed. He never received Russian citizenship. At that moment his son was serving yet another “carousel arrest.”