This morning, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter and the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War, woke up to his second year in prison.
After five years of covering Russia, he was arrested in March 2023. It came as a shock: Though Russian journalists have long faced increasing repression and even deadly peril, international journalists “were generally a somewhat protected class,” as my former colleague Jonathan Guyer wrote one year ago.
One thing Gershkovich had in common with many Russian journalists who have run afoul of the state: His arrest was bogus. Within two weeks, the US government officially designated him as “wrongfully detained.” Reporters Without Borders (RSF), meanwhile, considers him a “Russian state hostage.” Despite a year of pre-trial hearings and extensions on his detention, Russia has publicly provided no clear evidence to substantiate its allegations.
For the media that remains in the country, it has also “had a huge chilling effect, with further self-censorship,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said over email.
That all serves Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. But what’s happened to Gershkovich isn’t just about Putin.
Yes, his government was already particularly bad on press freedom and has only gotten worse since Russia invaded Ukraine: Over 30 journalists in Russia are currently imprisoned because of their reporting, and “between 1,500 to 1,800 Russian journalists were forced into exile” over the last two years, according to a report by the RSF’s JX Fund.
“Russia is ranked 164th out of 180 countries in the last Press Freedom Index,” Cavelier pointed out. “It dropped another nine places last year, in the worst category of the ranking where the press freedom situation is classified as ‘very serious.’”
But it would be short-sighted to think that brazen…
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