It was the best New Year’s Eve ever. Chris van Heerden and his lady, Ksenia Karelina, were in Istanbul, not just celebrating 2024’s arrival, but a love that had blossomed in the previous months. It’s not easy in this day and age, but the couple was happy.

Van Heerden, then 36, was on the verge of retirement, thinking about one more fight after a loss in April 2022 to Conor Benn, and for Ksenia’s 33rd birthday he bought her a ticket to see her family in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

By January, all good thoughts of their time in Turkey had vanished when she was arrested. The charge? Treason. The reason? She made a $50 donation to a New York-based charity aiding Ukraine.

The sentence? Twelve years in a Russian penal colony.

It’s been the nightmare neither of them has been able to wake up from.

“I think, ‘What world am I living in?’” Van Heerden told BoxingScene. “How did everything go from being so amazing? We were together for New Year's in Istanbul, and we had the best couple of days there as a couple. And it was magical. And now I catch myself and I say, is this a dream? What am I living right now? What are the chances? I'm just a boxer. I'm not into politics. I'm not into any of that. What are the chances that I'm living this dream?”

It baffles the mind, but it not making sense doesn’t help resolve the situation in a positive manner. So Van Heerden has done the only thing he knows – he fights. And the fight now is to get Karelina declared wrongfully detained on the United States side. Once that happens, she becomes a priority when and if there’s a prisoner swap between the US and Russia, and the hope is that her status gets upgraded as soon as possible.

“We've met all the criteria, and right now I'm in conversation with the State Department and they say, ‘Okay, we need nothing else from you,’” said Van Heerden.

So now, they wait. 

“Right now, we've done everything,” he said. “All I need to do is pray, and all we need is just to share what I share on my social media and keep this story alive. That's the best thing we can do.”

As for Karelina, a dual citizen, her sentence was appealed, so she hasn’t been transferred to the penal colony yet, and she is able to receive visits from her family and letters from Van Heerden.

“We can write letters to each other twice a month,” he said. “So I write a letter to the prison, they read it, they scan it, they give it to her, she writes back, they read it, they scan it, they send it back to me.”

Any way you slice it, it’s a horrible way to have a relationship, and with everything going on, it sped up Van Heerden’s decision to retire in August.

“I wanted to have one more fight this year, but a big part of why I retired is because this is the toughest fight I've been in, fighting for this girl's freedom,” he said. “It's taking so much of my time, it's taking so much of my energy that I have no time to really focus on boxing right now. I just don't. Someone is depending on me, and I'm in a tough fight right now, but it’s one I'm very confident we're going to win, and soon we'll celebrate and soon she'll be back, and we'll be able to share our story. It's a beautiful love story.” 

Van Heerden tries to stay positive, but it’s a situation where he’s helpless to solve this on his own. It’s the same thing as when his father, Daniel, was tragically murdered in 2018. He fights on, though, putting his own grief to the side in order to push forward. And it’s given him a drive he hasn’t had since 2018.

“Every single day, I have something to do, emails to get back to, I'm on a call with either the state department or my team,” he said. “I'm busy fighting for this girl’s freedom. When I lost my father, I lost my fire. I lost my passion. I lost my will to win. I lost my love for boxing, but I still went on fighting. Now when I lost to Conor Benn in 2022, I made peace with it. I said, ‘You know what? I'm 35 years old, I don't want to do this. I’m not lying to everyone’. And I woke up every single morning and I asked myself, what is my purpose? 

“Fast forward to January 27th when my girlfriend was arrested. I wake up every single morning with a purpose now. I'm alive. I'm fighting for someone's freedom. It's a horrible situation, but I'm alive and I feel like I have a purpose and that is, I got to get this girl out. And then people say, but Chris, how much can you do? Let me tell you how much I'm doing. I am literally the one guy that can help getting Ksenia out.” 

That’s because, as of last week, there’s been no contact with her by US officials, despite Karelina having been a citizen of the United States since 2021.

“Russia does not recognize the dual citizenship,” said Van Heerden. “Russia says she's not an American because she's Russian, and they are blocking all Americans to see her. So, the State Department, the White House, they get the information from me because I am in contact with her lawyer and I'm in contact with her mom and dad every day. I am literally the guy in the middle connecting these dots and it's exhausting. But, like I said, I feel more alive and I have a purpose.” 

As for Karelina, Van Heerden recognizes that there were, understandably, some rough moments over the past several months, but now she’s optimistic that this nightmare will eventually be coming to an end. Once she gets that wrongfully detained status, then it could just be a matter of a phone call with little notice that says a swap is taking place. And the couple is hopeful that the call comes sooner rather than later, making New Year’s 2025 even better than 2024.

“I’ve got fight in me, and I know I'm going to push through it,” said Van Heerden. “And I believe that, at the end of the day, we're going to have something to celebrate and that some good will come out of it. I believe it.”