Arrest of journalist makes covering Russia even tougher

The exodus began roughly a year ago, in the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Western news organizations, confronting a harsh crackdown on free speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin, pulled correspondents from Moscow and suspended their news gathering in Russia. The risk to journalists, in a country where describing a war as a “war” was suddenly a crime, was too great.

Some outlets, including the BBC, quickly resumed their work in the country; others, including Bloomberg News, never returned. Newspapers that once maintained permanent Moscow bureaus began rotating correspondents in and out from safer posts such as Berlin and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Still, even under challenging circumstances, Western correspondents were hopeful that their work could continue.

That hope was shattered last week by the arrest of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who is believed to be the first American reporter held on spying charges in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Journal rejects the claims against Gershkovich, 31, a son of Soviet Jewish emigres, and the Biden administration has lobbied for his release.

Gershkovich on Friday was formally charged with espionage, according to Russian state media. The Tass news agency, citing an unidentified law enforcement source, also said he had denied the accusations.

Regardless of the outcome of Gershkovich’s case, his arrest sent an indisputable signal that foreign reporters were newly vulnerable. Now, news organisations are reexamining how to chronicle one of the world’s most urgent geopolitical stories as their journalists face even greater peril.

“It has a chilling effect for everyone,” Polina Ivanova, a Russia correspondent for The Financial Times, said at a recent gathering of journalists in London, where attendees lined up to write letters of support to be delivered to Gershkovich inside the Lefortovo prison in Moscow.

Gershkovich had been accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry, a process that had continued even after the invasion of Ukraine and was thought to grant a degree of protection for Western journalists. The move against him scrambled that assumption. Since his arrest, the Journal’s Moscow bureau chief has left the country. The New York Times moved most of its bureau out of the country and currently has no reporters there, but it has been sending journalists into Russia regularly.

American journalists, in particular, had worried that Russian authorities might detain them to instigate a prisoner exchange. Correspondents who are European citizens were perceived to be slightly less vulnerable. The Gershkovich episode shows that, now, all bets are off.

“It’s very clear that no foreign correspondents are going to be spared from this repression,” said Gulnoza Said, who monitors press freedoms in Russia for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The world is losing that window into Russia, and the Russian people are losing one of the very few platforms where they can be heard.”

For a nation increasingly viewed as an avatar of repression and autocracy, Russia had, until recently, afforded Western correspondents a fair amount of leeway in reporting on its politics, society and culture. Reporters assumed their movements and communications were monitored. But starting in the mid-1980s, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev meant that Western journalists could interview civilians and cultivate sources in the bureaucracy.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said the current situation was “180 degrees different” from his experience as a young reporter in Moscow from 1988-92.

“Of course our phones were tapped, of course our apartments were bugged,” Remnick said in an interview. “The foreign ministry was all over us. Our travel was restricted. All that said, we reported incredibly freely compared to what had been the case for the entire Soviet experience.”

Inside Russia, scoops reported by Western media outlets would sometimes be picked up by Russian state newswires, and local journalists felt emboldened to cite foreign reporting when questioning state authorities.

For the Kremlin, the presence of journalists from prominent outlets such as the BBC, CNN and Agence France-Presse was deemed a sign of the government’s legitimacy and influence on the world stage. Foreign outlets also provided a vehicle for Putin’s government to try to shape its global image and speak directly to a Western elite.

The Ukraine invasion has evidently shifted that calculus. Gershkovich’s arrest signaled that Putin — who has made elaborate efforts to shield Russia’s struggles in Ukraine from public view — may see diminishing utility in accommodating foreign journalists.

Bill Keller, who reported in Moscow for the Times from 1986-91, said Gershkovich’s arrest — a “hostage-taking,” in Keller’s view — was a clear attempt to intimidate foreign reporters and the Russian citizens who might speak with them.

“It may prolong the destaffing of foreign news bureaus in Russia, but it won’t stop reporting from surrounding countries,” said Keller, who later served as executive editor of the Times. Journalists covering Russia from abroad, he added, can now station themselves in more proximate areas such as the Baltics and Ukraine, which in past generations were under Moscow’s control.

Ivanova, who has helped lead efforts to galvanize support for Gershkovich and secure his freedom, said that “within the realms of the possible,” news organizations would endeavor “to operate on the ground for as long as it is possible.”

“Obviously that comes with great challenges, and that process of calculation is very difficult, and sometimes things come at you which you completely did not expect,” she said. “But reporting on the ground is absolutely essential.” — The New York Times.