“To declare myself guilty is to admit that in Russia the work of a journalist is a crime. » The words are harsh, spoken loud and clear on Monday September 5 by Ivan Safronov at the end of his trial. Accused of ” high treason “ because suspected of having passed on state secrets, the journalist has just been sentenced to twenty-two years in a penal colony under a strict regime. Having become a symbol of the resistance of the independent press against Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, the young man, 32, had refused the agreement that the prosecution would have offered him: halving of his sentence if he agreed to admit his guilt. .
With this very heavy condemnation, the message is clear: intensify the climate of intimidation in Russia. The journalist, renowned for his coverage of space and military affairs, had already been imprisoned for more than two years. Arrested in July 2020, he had been the newspaper correspondent Knowledge et Kommersant, renowned for their relatively free and critical coverage, before becoming an adviser to the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. He has always denied leaking state secrets, explaining that the supposedly “top secret” information was actually publicly available data on Russian space equipment and military cooperation with Syria.
During the trial, conducted behind closed doors, he asked the investigators to grant him a few hours of access to a computer and the Internet to prove that the “classified information” included in the file was indeed already known. In vain.
“It’s all grotesque…” regrets Ivan Pavlov, the human rights lawyer who initially defended Ivan Safronov before being himself prosecuted and forced into exile in Georgia. “Everything that has happened in Russia in recent years, since 2020, was in preparation for the war in Ukraine. And the case of Ivan Safronov was just one more link in the chain of preparedness measures: the intimidation of journalists. There is now a state monopoly on free speech. Or, more exactly, there is no more freedom. Speech is still there, but it is not free”, did he declare. The lawyer also recalls that the indictment contains no evidence that Ivan Safronov received money for his alleged work with Western intelligence services.
License revocation
This judicial crackdown on independent media and journalists has intensified for six months and the start of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Chance of the calendar of Russian justice, the verdict against Ivan Safronov fell the same day as a new decision concerning the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The magazine, one of the last strongholds of the press with a rebellious tone, has learned of the revocation by the courts of its license for the paper edition. The media of the Nobel Peace Prize Dmitry Muratov had already had to suspend its publication in March, a few days after the start of the “special operation”.
Concretely, this revocation is now equivalent to the invalidation of the registration certificate and marks the definitive end of Novaya Gazetaof which Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, who died on Tuesday August 30, was a historic support. “Today, they killed the newspaper”, denounced Dmitry Muratov, symbolically at the head of the funeral procession of the father of “perestroika” on Saturday.