With the closure of Deutsche Welle’s correspondent’s office, Moscow’s critical media representatives have lost another ally.
Pavel Kanygin is sitting in the Starbucks at the Yugo-Zapadnaya metro station and is busy with his mobile phone. After Deutsche Welle, he says, it’s probably YouTube’s turn. He fears that the video platform will soon be blocked across Russia. “Everything will only get worse,” he says
Kanygin is a journalist, liberal and actually an optimist. He recently started his own online project: “Prodolschenie sledujet”, to be continued. At the moment, however, media projects are more likely to be completed in Moscow. Last week, the Russian authorities revoked the broadcasting license of the German foreign channel Deutsche Welle (DW), closed its correspondent’s office, and canceled the accreditations of the five media representatives, three of them Russian. “A huge blow for all of us,” says German office manager Juri Rescheto. Moscow’s weird and drastic answer to the broadcast ban for the Russian state broadcaster RT DE in Germany.
But in the coffee shops and online chats of the Moscow scene, DW is hardly an issue. “Of course, the feeling that foreign journalists are being pushed out of Moscow is bad,” explains Kanygin. Only it cannot be compared with the dangers for Russian journalists. “We are more concerned about the threats that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is making against our journalists,” confirms Andrei Lipski, foreign director of Novaya Gazeta. Just a few days ago, Yelena Milashina, the opposition newspaper’s Caucasus reporter, said she was leaving Russia for security reasons. Kadyrov had previously insulted her and the human rights activist Igor Kaljapin as “terrorists”. “We’ve always crushed terrorists,” he explained. “And we will continue to do that with them.”
For Russia’s opposition journalists, threats or arrests have long been part of everyday life. Like the editors of “Novaya Gazeta”, Kadyrov also wants to put those of the liberal broadcaster TV Doschd behind bars. Doschd can only make Internet television in its own country due to the lack of a broadcasting license. And like the news portal meduza.io, he was declared a “foreign agent”. Other editorial offices fled abroad completely.
The propaganda channel RT, which is swimming in state money and with its ever new foreign branches, enjoys little sympathy among those left behind. “RT is a format of very low journalistic quality,” says Lipski. “On the other hand, the standards of the press should apply everywhere. When, in the early 1990s, everyone was shouting that the communist newspaper Pravda should be banned, I was against it too. You can’t ban the press, even if you don’t like it. The German bureaucracy also commits stupid things.”
But Moscow’s media professionals also sense that they are losing another ally in the DW correspondents’ office. Who will write about the Milashina,” asks Kanygin, “when Western journalists leave Moscow?” Apart from them, there are a good half dozen critical national media outlets in Russia. “The Germans got it first,” says photographer Vitali, who is also considering emigrating. “The French could be next, they’re also investigating RT.”
Kanygin has finished his coffee and looks over at a young man who has sat down two tables away. “A suspicious figure,” he murmurs. “Come on, let’s go.” The fear of being spied on and being followed has long been commonplace in Russian journalism.
