Russian American journalist Masha Gessen put on Kremlin’s wanted list
Russian police have put prominent Russian American journalist and author Masha Gessen on a wanted list after opening a criminal case against them on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army.
It is the latest step in an unrelenting crackdown against dissent in Russia that has intensified since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine more than 21 months ago, on 24 February 2022.
The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona was the first to report on Friday that Gessen’s profile has appeared on the online wanted list of Russia’s interior ministry, and the Associated Press was able to confirm that it was. It was not clear from the profile when exactly Gessen was added to the list.
Russian media reported last month that a criminal case against Gessen, an award-winning author and an outspoken critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was launched over an interview with the prominent Russian journalist Yury Dud.
In the interview, which was released on YouTube in September 2022 and has since been viewed more than 6.5m times, the two among other things discussed atrocities by Russian armed forces in Bucha, a Ukrainian town near Kyiv that was briefly occupied by the Russian forces.
After Ukrainian troops retook it, they found the bodies of men, women and children on the streets, in yards and homes, and in mass graves, with some showing signs of torture. Russian officials have vehemently denied their forces were responsible and have prosecuted a number of Russian public figures for speaking out about Bucha, handing some lengthy prison terms.
Those prosecutions were carried out under a new law Moscow adopted days after sending troops to Ukraine that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war deviating from the official narrative.
Between late February 2022 and early this month, 19,844 people have been detained for speaking out or protesting against the war while 776 people have been implicated in criminal cases over their anti-war stance, according to the OVD-Info rights group, which tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.
Gessen, who holds dual Russian and American citizenships and lives in the US, is unlikely to be arrested, unless they travel to a country with an extradition treaty with Russia. But a Russian court could still hold a trial in absentia and hand out a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
Pressure is also mounting on dissidents imprisoned in Russia. On Friday, supporters of Alexei Gorinov, a former member of a Moscow municipal council sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war, reported that his health significantly deteriorated in prison and he is not being given the treatment he needs.
Gorinov was sentenced last year and is now serving time at a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. In a post on the messaging app Telegram, his supporters said his lawyer visited him on Friday and said Gorinov “doesn’t have the strength to sit up on a chair or even speak”. He told the lawyer that he has bronchitis and fever, but prison doctors claim he does not need treatment, the post said.
Gorinov, 62, has a chronic pulmonary condition, and several years ago had part of a lung removed, the post said.
Allies of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny have also expressed concerns over his wellbeing.
Navalny is serving a 19-year prison term on charges of extremism in the same region as Gorinov, and for the last three days his lawyers have not been allowed to visit him, the politician’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Yarmysh said that letters to Navalny were also not being delivered to him.