In Putin’s Russia, a jail sentence awaits those who speak the truth
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that at least 320 members of the press were behind bars around the globe as 2024 began. In Vladimir Putin’s police state, at least 22 journalists are jailed, most for committing that most elemental of journalistic duties, speaking the truth. Two of them are American reporters.
One of them, Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal, will soon mark a year in the infamous Lefortovo prison, awaiting trial on charges of espionage. The other, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/radio Liberty, was arrested while visiting her mother and has been in detention since October.
The charges against both are a travesty. Their incarceration is a violation of their rights and an assault on foreign journalists that is even more egregious than what transpired under Soviet rule. The Biden administration should continue to do all in its power to secure their freedom.
Gershkovich, now 32, is not a spy, and his accusers know it. He is a reporter, a correspondent for the Journal who worked in Moscow with official accreditation from the Russian government until he was taken prisoner by a secretive police unit in Yekaterinburg on March 29, 2023.
The reason for the arrest may be known only to Putin. Perhaps it was to send a signal that foreign correspondents are no safer from the reach of the Kremlin’s police than Russian reporters. For some time now, and especially since the invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Kremlin under Putin has dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, as demonstrated most starkly by the sudden death last month of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent opponent.
Perhaps Gershkovich was seized as a pawn to swap for Russians held in the West, as American basketball player Brittney Griner was in 2022. Perhaps it was because Gershkovich’s parents are Russian Jews who emigrated in the 1970s, so Putin views him, as he views Ukraine, as within his sphere of repression.
As the anniversary of Gershkovich’s incarceration approaches, there is no evidence of a potential trade, although Putin did suggest last month that it could happen. And there is no indication that a trial is imminent. Instead, Gershkovich will soon have spent a year at Lefortovo, which was built in the 19th century and was notorious in the Soviet era as an interrogation center for political prisoners, who are typically held in solitary confinement. Human contact is strictly limited: Only lawyers are usually allowed to visit.
Kurmasheva, a dual Russian and American citizen, lived with her husband and two daughters in Prague and worked there as an editor for RFE/RL’S Tatar-bashkir service. She traveled to the Russian city of Kazan last May to visit her ailing mother but was prevented from leaving, purportedly for failing to register her American passport. On Oct. 18, she was detained for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” and she has been held since.
Introduced in 2012, the foreign agent law has been a central feature of Putin’s efforts to portray the West as a devious enemy seeking to undermine Russia. The law requires any organization or individual in Russia who receives money from abroad to register as a “foreign agent,” a phrase that, in Russian, carries a clear connotation of espionage. In December, authorities in Kazan began yet another investigation of Kurmasheva, this one for spreading false information about the Russian army, and on Feb. 1, her pretrial detention was extended for two months.
Her husband, Pavel Butorin, who also works for RFE/RL, has said he suspects the new case involves a book that Kurmasheva and her colleagues coedited called “Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” a collection of radio interviews with Russian people who expressed their anti-war feelings in different ways. (One of them said she was arrested for braiding a green ribbon in her hair.) Opposing the war is a crime in Russia, and RFE/RL itself has been branded an “undesirable organization,” putting Russians at risk for any connection with it.
Butorin and a host of press organizations have been campaigning for the State Department to declare that Kurmasheva has been wrongfully detained — a finding that would allow her to receive intensified attention by the president’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. Gershkovich’s case was so categorized soon after he was detained, as was that of another American being held in Russia, Paul Whelan, who was convicted in 2020 of spying and sentenced to 16 years of incarceration. The State Department has yet to officially assign similar urgency to Kurmasheva’s case, but it should.
However different the details of Gershkovich’s and Kurmasheva’s cases, they both have their origins in Putin’s personal vindictiveness. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, the rules of officially acceptable behavior for foreign journalists were fairly clear, and the consequences for violating them were rarely more serious than expulsion. Putin’s approach to the international media — now among the only sources of independent news in the country — has become steadily more malevolent and capricious as his war on Ukraine has dragged on.
Putin, having yet again consolidated his power as Russia’s leader, is unlikely to be moved by the U.S. government’s pressure or censure about his treatment of journalists. Yet it remains incumbent on the U.S. government and on institutions of the free press to explore every avenue to win the release of Kurmasheva and Gershkovich and to continue to insist, using whatever diplomatic tools are available to them, that Putin cease intimidating journalists.
Journalists in Russia who are working to break through the obstacles and traps he has set are performing a critical service in shedding light on his authoritarian and expansionist project. He fears them for a reason, and for that same reason they deserve the unflagging support of all those who cherish freedom.