More than five years in jail for being a journalist

Journalism continues to be a dangerous profession in Russia. Last week, a Moscow court sentenced four journalists to five and a half years in prison on charges of collaborating with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), an organisation founded by Alexei Navalny and outlawed as “extremist” in Russia.

• The journalists — Antonina Favorskaya, Sergei Karelin, Konstantin Gabov and Artem Krieger — were found guilty of “making and editing videos and publications for FBK”. The prosecutor demanded that the journalists be sentenced to 5 years and 11 months in prison. The trial was held behind closed doors.
• All the journalists were arrested back in 2024. The first to be detained was Favorskaya, who worked for the SOTAVision publication as a video journalist. She actively covered Navalny's trials and filmed his appearance, via video link, at a court hearing the day before his death. The footage she shot became the last video of Navalny, whose death in an Arctic prison colony is characterized as premeditated murder by his associates.
• Gabov, who had also worked with Reuters and Deutsche Welle, and Karelin, who worked with the Associated Press and Deutsche Welle were arrested next, and then two months later, Krieger, who worked for SOTAvision was detained. Krieger’s uncle, opposition activist Mikhail Krieger, was already in prison, serving a seven-year sentence on charges of “justifying terrorism”. All of them are recognized by Russian human rights group Memorial as political prisoners.
• The journalists slammed the case against them and the state of media freedom in their final statements before the court, according to transcripts published by their lawyers. “Independent journalism is equated to extremism,” said Gabov. Prison censors blocked the publication of Favorskaya's final testimony, which is known to have lasted 40 minutes and consisted of 37 pages.

Why the world should care

Even if Russia is able to negotiate a U.S.-brokered truce with Ukraine, repression, which has been ratched up to its most intense since the Soviet era, will not disappear. A five-year prison sentence for professional journalism is vivid proof of this.