In a short period of three days, Russian authorities have detained at least three Russian journalists from media and news agencies in Western countries considered “unfriendly” by the Kremlin. This is Sergei Mingazov, a reporter for the Russian edition of the American magazine Forbes, who has been arrested on charges of discrediting the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine for sharing various third-party information about the Bucha massacre on his social networks. The Kremlin accuses Sergei Karelin and Konstantin Gábov—of the American agency Associated Press (AP) and the British agency Reuters, respectively—of alleged collaboration with the team of the dissident who died in prison, Alexei Navalny. The arrests of these journalists come in addition to the expulsions and imprisonments of other Western and Russian correspondents in the last year.
Russian security forces detained Mingázov at his home at six in the morning last Friday in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, located about 25 kilometers from the Chinese border. The authorities seized both his computer and his phone as well as those of his children and wife, as revealed Forbes. A court there ruled a day later, on Saturday, that he must remain under house arrest until the conclusion of his trial. At the end of the hearing, Mingázov declared that he hoped to be able to settle the matter, pleading guilty and paying a fine, according to what he told local media 7×7.
The accusation against the reporter Forbes It also contemplates sentences of between five and ten years in prison. “The formal complaint is based on article 207.3 of the Russian criminal code: the dissemination under a reliable guise of deliberately false information about use related to the armed forces due to hatred, political, ideological, racial, national or religious enmity,” he revealed. the reporter’s lawyer, Konstantín Bubon, through his Facebook profile.
The Russian regime has accused Mingázov of discrediting its armed forces by sharing on his personal Telegram profile, The Khabarovsk Mingaceta—a play on words with his last name and his city—, the publications of other channels about the massacre that occurred between March and April 2022 in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. Among the messages is one broadcast on April 4, 2022 with the title Bucha: tests and evidence.It is a compilation by independent reporter Dmitri Kolezev—in search and capture since that same year—of the images taken at the site by media such as CNN and The New York Times that showed the bodies of Bucha residents lying on the streets of the town, some of them gagged.
A day earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry had denied that its troops had killed civilians in that city: “During the time that this settlement was under the control of the Russian armed forces, not a single local resident suffered violent actions.” Weeks later, at the end of April, President Vladimir Putin told UN Secretary General António Guterres that the massacre had been staged and that the Kremlin knew “who prepared this provocation, with what means and what type of people they worked.” in her”.
Mingázov’s case has certain similarities with that of the German radio WDR correspondent, Bjorn Blaschke, fined 40,000 rubles (about 400 euros) in February of this year for the crime of having discredited the Russian army. According to an anonymous source from the independent media Ejo Moskvi, the police removed Blaschke from a train when he was traveling from Vladivostok to Moscow for a tweet published in 2022 in which he linked the offensive on Ukraine with the rise in wheat and fuel prices in several countries. Africa. The WDR station removed the correspondent from Russia after his arrest.
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Unlike the Mingazov trial, Russian authorities have chosen to file charges of “extremism” in the cases of Reuters and Associated Press contributors Konstantin Gabov and Sergei Karelin, respectively. Both will remain in preventive detention for at least two months under the accusation of having participated in the activities of Navalny’s organization, who died suddenly in a prison in the Arctic Circle in February.
“Gábov participated in the preparation of photographic and video materials for publication on the Navalny LIVE YouTube channel.”,The Basmanny District Court of Moscow said in a statement. According to the judicial file, Gabov was arrested in Moscow last Saturday. Reuters has not commented on the arrest of his collaborator, who previously also worked for Russian channels Mirand Moskvá 24 and the Belarusian Belsat.
Karelin was arrested on Friday in the Arctic region of Murmansk, next to the border with Norway and Finland. The cameraman, also an Israeli national, had previously worked for the German radio and television station Deutsche Welle, whose headquarters in Russia was closed by the Kremlin in 2022 in response to Berlin’s veto on the broadcast of Russia Today in German. “The Associated Press is very concerned about the arrest of Russian cameraman Sergei Karelin. “We are seeking additional information,” the agency for which he works stated in a statement.
The arrests of Gábov and Karelin share the same accusation as the arrest of journalist Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the independent channel SotaVision, at the end of March. The reporter, who could be sentenced to six years in prison, has been linked to the dissident’s team after having witnessed his criminal proceedings in recent years and having visited his grave for several days after his burial to photograph the tributes to the opponent.
These imprisonments add to a list in which, in addition to the expulsions of several correspondents, there are also two detained American reporters: Evan Gershkovich, of the Wall Street Journal, which the Kremlin accuses of espionage for a report on the manufacture of tanks, and Alsosu Kurmasheva, of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFERL), recently declared an “undesirable organization” by Moscow. After this measure, it is enough to share a news story from RFERL or speak to the station to be fined or sentenced to prison in Russia.
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