The persecution of the press critical of power has been on the rise in recent years, but the invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated it
The fight of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, against the independent press already acquires merciless overtones. The Justice supervised by him, the courts that are formally supposed to act in accordance with the Law, revoked this Monday the license of the biweekly ‘Nóvaya Gazeta’, where the murdered reporter Anna Politkóvskaya wrote and whose director, Dmitri Murátov, was awarded the Nobel Prize of Peace in 2021. And, in parallel, the expert journalist on defense issues, Iván Safronov, was sentenced by the Moscow Municipal Court to 22 years in prison under a severe regime for two crimes of “high treason”.
Safrónov, 32 years old, will also have to pay a fine of 500,000 rubles (more than 8,300 euros) and, once he completes his sentence, his movements within Russia will be restricted for two years. The accusation of “high treason” was presented by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB) referring to two different episodes: In 2015 Safronov passed information about the troops to the political scientist Demuri Voronin, who has Russian and German citizenship. Russians in Syria; and, in 2017, through his friend, the Czech Martin Larysh, he provided secret information to the secret services of the Czech Republic.
But the Russian journalist denies it and declared himself innocent from the start. His lawyers maintain that even prosecution witnesses confirmed during interrogations that there was no betrayal, and that Safronov never had access to state secrets. His investigative work was purely journalistic. The lawyer Evgueni Smirnov has assured that the prosecutor Elvira Zotchik proposed that the sentence would be only 12 years, if he pleaded guilty, but Safrónov rejected the proposal, insisted on his innocence and, in his last word at the end of the trial, stressed that the persecution he suffers is due to his work as a journalist, not to any kind of betrayal or espionage.
«If you believe what the Prosecutor’s Office asserts, at some unestablished moment, on some undetermined date, I extracted something secret from some unidentified people. They searched for these mythical bearers of secrets, but did not find them. Why? I have an answer: because there are no people from whom I have never been able to find out something secret, “said the journalist when he finished the hearing.
Voronin exonerated Safronov while the publication ‘Proyekt’, after studying the documents of the case, concluded that most of the supposedly classified information handled by the journalist and transmitted to the West is available on the Internet. The British chain ‘BBC’ believes that the article he wrote detailing the content of a contract to supply Russian fighter planes to Egypt could be the real reason for the persecution unleashed against him.
He was arrested in Moscow by FSB agents on July 7, 2020. At the time, he was working as an adviser to Roskosmos, the Russian space agency. The FSB then assured that Safrónov, following the instructions of a special NATO department, “collected and transmitted to his contact – in the Alliance – information on military-technical cooperation, arms sales, defense and Russian security.”
For nearly two years since his arrest, the journalist was not allowed to see his relatives, including not calling his mother on her birthday. Two of his lawyers, Ivan Pavlov and Evgueni Smirnov, were forced to leave Russia due to pressure, and another, Dmitri Talantov, was arrested and charged in a case of “forgeries” related to the Russian Army, the publication says. Medusa’. Pavlov said after the arrest that the nature of the trial behind closed doors, alleging state secrets, “will facilitate the rigging of evidence as there is no transparency.”
Safrónov wrote for 10 years for the prestigious newspaper ‘Kommersant’, where he left after the scandal that was formed by an article of his assuring that the president of the Federation Council (Upper House of the Russian Parliament), Valentina Matviyenko, had fallen into disgrace and was going to be fired. In 2019, he had published material that raised controversy over the sale contract to Egypt for 20 Sukhoi-35 fighter jets. He later went to work at ‘Védomosti’, but, in May 2020, after being appointed as the new director of the newspaper, Andrei Shmárov, he went to ‘Roskosmos’.
Safronov’s father, of the same surname and also named Ivan, was also a military journalist and columnist for Kommersant. He died on March 2, 2007 after falling from the fifth floor of the building where he lived, even though his apartment was on the third floor. There was speculation about the possible murder of him, but, in the end, the Russian Justice ruled that it was a suicide.
Persecution of the critical press
On the other hand, the Moscow Basmanni court recognized on Monday as “invalid the registration certificate of the paper version of ‘Nóvaya Gazeta’.” The persecution of the press critical of power has been on the rise in recent years, but the invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated it. Numerous websites of various publications have been blocked and a large number of Russian journalists have had to leave the country.
The court ruling against ‘Nóvaya Gazeta’ was a consequence of the complaint filed at the end of July by the Russian regulator, Roskomnadzor, which argued the absence of the newsroom’s statutes when registering again with the Administration. In two other separate complaints, also filed in July, Roskomnadzor requested to cancel the authorizations of the digital edition and of a new magazine from the same publisher. These demands will be examined by the Russian Justice during the month of September. ‘Nóvaya Gazeta’ has not been published since the end of March. Its management suspended publication on the Internet and in print for fear of reprisals against its journalists due to the critical position of the newspaper in relation to the Russian offensive against Ukraine.
Since its creation in 1993, six journalists and collaborators of the biweekly have been murdered, including Politkóvskaya. The editorial office of ‘Nóvaya Gazeta’ has published a letter of support for Safronov.
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