According to Nina Kutina, life for her and her two daughters in their jungle cave had been peaceful.
Buried deep in the forests of Gokarna, a coastal town in southern India, they had woken “up with the sun, swam in rivers and lived in nature”.
“I cooked on a fire or gas cylinder, depending on the season, and got groceries from a nearby village. We painted, sang songs, read books and lived peacefully,” Kutina said, according to Indian media reports.
Then the police arrived.
The story of how the 40-year-old Russian woman and her daughters, aged six and four, came to be living in a damp cave in the state of Karnataka has gripped the country.
The family was discovered by police on 9 July during a patrol of the hilly forest area, which is popular with tourists, when officers spied a curtain of red saris hanging in the trees. Moving closer, they realised it was covering the entrance of a cave.
A statue of a Hindu god was visible, as were scattered items of clothing. Then a blond child emerged. Behind her, the police were astonished to find Kutina, asleep with another child by her side.
Kutina told officers she had moved to the cave for meditation and prayer, and to get herself and her children away from modern urban life and into nature.
She had cooked vegetable curries and roti on a small gas stove and they had bathed in waterfalls and slept on plastic mats.
Police believe she had been there for at least a week when they found her and had spent several stints living in the cave over the past nine months.
Kutina dismissed the officers’ warnings that it was a highly dangerous place to live, especially during the monsoon, telling police that “animals and snakes are our friends” and that it was only humans who were dangerous.
Despite her objections, police insisted on removing the family from the cave and taking them back to the town, where they were placed in a shelter after Kutina had a hospital checkup. M Narayana, a local superintendent of police, said Kutina appeared “deeply disillusioned with human society, yet still compassionate and spiritually grounded”.
Kutina messaged a friend after being taken from her “big and beautiful cave”, saying her family had been “placed in a prison without sky, without grass, without a waterfall, with an icy hard floor on which we now sleep for ‘protection from rain and snakes’…. Once again, evil has won.”
According to immigration records cited by Indian officials, Kutina first travelled to India in 2016, ending up in Arambol Beach, in Goa, a destination popular with Russian travellers. A year later, she had begun a relationship with an Israeli man, Dror Goldstein. After overstaying her visa in 2018, Kutina was deported to Russia and travelled to Ukraine, where she had their first daughter. She already had two older sons from a previous relationship.
In 2020, Kutina returned to India with her children. She reunited with Goldstein in Goa and became pregnant again, making money as an art and language teacher.
According to Goldstein, who spoke to Indian media, Kutina began withdrawing from him and would disappear for long periods with their two daughters. Then, in October last year, her eldest son, 21, was killed in a motorcycle crash in India. After Goldstein travelled to Nepal to renew his visa, he returned to Goa to find Kutina and their daughters had disappeared.
He filed a police report in December but had heard nothing until reports of their discovery emerged this week.
Asked by journalists why she had remained in India without any valid documents, Kutina said there were “many complicated reasons”.
“First, there were multiple personal losses – not just the death of my son, but also a few other close people. We were constantly dealing with grief, paperwork and other problems,” she said.
Kutina claimed her son’s ashes were among the belongings removed from the cave.
With no valid documents to remain, the family were moved to a detention centre and police are arranging for Kutina’s deportation to Russia.
