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NEW YORK (AP) — The Journal-reported-russia-arrested-cd511a94a3fe0ce604df6648ef5adec5">arrest of a Wall Street Journal reporter on espionage charges in Russia has news organizations based outside the country weighing for the second Time in a year whether the risks of reporting there during wartime are too great.
“Russia is sending the message that journalism within your borders is criminalized and that foreign correspondents seeking to report from Russia do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law,” they said.
A reporter for The New York Times who was temporarily in Moscow, Valerie Hopkins, left after Gershkovich's arrest, the newspaper said.
Gershkovich's arrest comes a year after the Russian government, shortly after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, imposed harsh new restrictions on journalists that threatened punishment for reports that went against the Kremlin's version of events — even forbidding the use of the word “war” to describe the conflict.
Some news organizations pulled their journalists out as a result. Some of those journalists returned later when it became clear the restrictions were aimed mostly at Russians.
A free-lance Russian journalist, Andrey Novashov, was sentenced to eight months of “correctional labor” for allegedly reporting false information about the Russian military, CPJ said. Ilya Krasilshchik, former publisher of the Latvia-based news site Meduza, was prosecuted on a similar charge but he left the country, CPJ said.
Hundreds of Russian journalists have left the country, Ginsberg said.
To date, the advocacy group said it was unaware of any non-Russian journalists arrested or prosecuted under those laws. Gershkovich was detained on separate spying charges.
“Pretty much any foreign correspondent who is still there is getting ready to depart, or giving that very serious consideration at this point,” said Ann Cooper, who was a National Public Radio bureau chief in Moscow and former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Gershkovich's arrest is “very unsettling and would make anybody feel uncomfortable,” she said.
The New York Times does not have a reporter based in Russia now but has sent journalists, like Hopkins, in for periodic assignments, a spokeswoman said. For Tuesday's newspaper, Hopkins wrote about a single father who was convicted of discrediting the army and had his 13-year-old daughter put in an orphanage in a case that stemmed from an antiwar drawing she made at school.
CNN has rotated international correspondents like Matthew Chance and Fred Pleitgen in and out of Russia for the past year, and Chance has been reporting from Moscow about Gershkovich's arrest. The network would not say more about its plans for staffing in the country.
“We are concerned by the news coming from Russia and are monitoring the situation there closely,” it said in a statement.
The Washington Post has three journalists reporting on Russia — Robyn Dixon, Mary Ilyushina and Francesca Ebel — but is not commenting on their whereabouts, a spokeswoman said. Dixon wrote about Gershkovich's arrest from Latvia. In a memo announcing Ebel's hiring last fall, the Post said its Russian team is working from outside the country.
Bloomberg News pulled its reporters from Russia last year, with Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait telling staff members then that the new laws seem “designed to turn any independent reporter into a criminal purely by association.” Bloomberg reporters have not returned to the country, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
Even journalists who fled Russia last year continued to report on the country, taking advantage of technology unavailable to predecessors from earlier generations: the Internet, encrypted communications, and mobile-phone cameras in the hands of millions of potential witnesses.
Still, Ginsberg said, “technology never replaces being there.”