Other voices: Jailed in Putin’s Russia for speaking the truth

Published 6:00 am Tuesday, April 2, 2024

The New York Times

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.

Mr. Gershkovich, now 32, is not a spy, and his accusers know it. He is a reporter, a correspondent for The Wall Street 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.

As the first anniversary of Mr. Gershkovich’s incarceration approaches, there is no evidence of a potential trade, though Mr. Putin did suggest in February that it could happen. And there is no indication that a trial is imminent.

Ms. Kurmasheva, a dual Russian and American citizen, lived with her husband and two daughters in Prague and worked there as an editor for R.F.E./R.L.’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 Mr. 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.

Her husband, Pavel Butorin, who also works for R.F.E./R.L., has said he suspects the new case involves a book that Ms. 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 antiwar feelings in different ways. Opposing the war is a crime in Russia.

Mr. Butorin and a host of press organizations have been campaigning for the State Department to declare that Ms. 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. Mr. 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 Ms. Kurmasheva’s case, but it should.

However different the details of Mr. Gershkovich’s and Ms. Kurmasheva’s cases, they both have their origins in Mr. 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. Mr. 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.