Mats Larsson
It is usually the easiest of the interview assignments for a foreign correspondent. To go out into town and do a survey with the locals.
That was the mission of a journalist at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Moscow in July 2022. RFE/RL receives financial support from the US government and focuses on news from Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia.
In English, this type of survey is called “vox pop”, roughly the voice of the people. But in Russia these days it can go badly for those who answer foreign journalists’ questions.
That’s what 39-year-old Yuri Kochovets did on that summer day in 2022 outside a Moscow metro station.
The question he received from the reporter from RFE/RL was about how he viewed “the need for de-escalation between Russia and the NATO countries”.
Kochovets was critical in his response. Critical of Vladimir Putin and the decision to invade:
– Our government started this. Putin and his band of thugs. Russia has created all these problems for itself, he answered, among other things.
Kochovets also said he saw no threat from NATO, pointing to how Russia bombed shopping malls in Ukraine and carried out abuses against civilians in Bucha, just outside Kiev.
It was enough. The wrong people saw the short video footage, read his response.
Yuriy Kochovets was first arrested in March 2023 and charged with “hooliganism”, but prosecutors then instead used the laws introduced shortly after the invasion of Ukraine that prohibit any criticism of the military and the war.
Prosecutors also focused on his calling Putin’s allies “a bunch of thugs.” It was – in their eyes – “spreading false information motivated by political hatred”.
Prosecutors demanded 5.5 years in prison for Kochovet’s answer to the reporter’s survey question.
So Yuri Kochovets still breathed a sigh of relief when the verdict came down. He got away with five years of forced labor.
But the whole process sends a clear signal to the Russian population. Even in a big city like Moscow or St. Petersburg, it is associated with great danger to talk to foreign journalists if only in a short survey.
Working conditions for foreign media have also become significantly tougher in Russia and even large media companies now usually have their employees based abroad, for example in one of the Baltic states.
One of RFE/RL’s journalists – Alsu Kurmasjeva – was arrested last October, accused of not registering as a “foreign agent”.
The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow correspondent Evan Gershkovich has been in custody for a year on espionage charges, a charge he and the paper deny.
But it is of course Russian citizens who run the greatest risks in the new everyday life where it is so easy to arouse the wrath of the Russian state.
According to the Russian human rights group OVD-Info, around 20,000 people have been arrested for expressing criticism of the war. Some get away with fines, others have been sentenced to prison.
Ksenia Chavana is accused of treason in Russia.
Photo: Facebook
And it takes very little to get hurt. Ksenia Chavana has both Russian and American citizenship – she lives in Los Angeles – but she used her Russian passport when she traveled to Yekaterinburg in January to visit family.
The FSB security police confiscated her mobile phone on arrival, but said everything was fine.
It was not. On her mobile, they discovered that she had donated around SEK 500 to Ukraine shortly after the outbreak of war in 2022.
So now she is accused of “treason”. She is incarcerated awaiting trial. Imprisoned in the Republic of Fear.
