Arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter ‘watershed’ for journalists, says BBC Russia editor

The arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was a “watershed” for foreign journalists in Russia and staying in the country “comes down to gut feeling now and personal choice”, the BBC’s Russia editor told a European Broadcasting Union (EBU) conference in Dublin on Tuesday.

“With Evan’s arrest, the assumptions that we had, that having a foreign ministry accreditation card and a valid Russian visa somehow gave protections to a foreign journalist here, they went out the window,” said Steve Rosenberg, appearing at the News Xchange event via video-link from Moscow.

Access to Russian officials and events has become harder in recent months, while intensified anti-West propaganda in Russian state media means foreign journalists are “made to feel increasingly that we are the enemy”, Mr Rosenberg said.

“You can’t plan any more. We live day-to-day or week-to-week because the situation is in a state of flux. Anything can happen,” he said.

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Mr Gershkovich, who is American, was arrested and detained on espionage charges on March 29th and no date has been set for his trial or release. EBU director general Noel Curran this week described his treatment as “unacceptable” in a speech flagging the loss of media freedom worldwide.

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Mr Rosenberg said the shrinking of the BBC’s team in Moscow – as a result of Kremlin-imposed visa restrictions and other issues arising from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – had created additional pressures but he hoped to stay for as long as there remained a benefit to his reporting.

“This is a huge country, right. It’s the biggest country in the world, with a lot of nuclear weapons. It’s an important country. So what happens here, and what people are thinking here – and what they will be thinking – I think that’s important to keep an eye on,” he said.

Marina Ovsyannikova, the former editor of state-controlled Channel One who burst into a live news broadcast with a sign reading “no war, stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda, they’re lying to you here”, also appeared via video-link from Paris.

Ukraine-born Ms Ovsyannikova, asked why she had worked for Channel One, said Vladimir Putin had tightened reporting restrictions “step by step” since she joined the broadcaster in 2003.

“Every year, there were more and more forbidden topics on Russian TV,” she said. “Yes, I was part of this propaganda machine, but I [could not] find another job in Russia, because Putin really destroyed all independent media in Russia.”

She said she hid from reality, “as many Russians do”.

Ms Ovsyannikova has been accused by a Channel One official of being a British spy, while she has also been suspected of being a Russian agent.

“There is absolutely no concrete reason to believe this,” said Christophe Deloire, director of Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders), who helped Ms Ovsyannikova make a “miracle” escape from Russia in October 2022. His organisation is working to “reverse the logic” of exported Putin propaganda by exporting independent journalism to Russia, he said.

Angelina Kariakina, head of news at Ukrainian public broadcaster UA: PBC, who travelled to Dublin from Kyiv, said Ukrainian journalists were “thinking about how this war is covered and whether the attention is still there”.

Last week’s Reuters Institute 46-country digital news report identified a pattern of “ambivalence, and possibly fatigue” towards coverage of the war.

“Of course, [global news fatigue] takes place,” Ms Kariakina said. “At the same time, in Ukraine, we are thinking about how to reach the audience that is sceptical about this war, the audience that is more pro-Russia.”

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In Kyiv life can resemble normality during the day, “but a rocket may hit you in any place in the country”, making broadcasters’ efforts to maintain coverage physically exhausting.

“Very often, you just don’t sleep through the night.”

RTÉ Europe editor Tony Connelly told the conference on Monday that the war was challenging to cover for a broadcaster such as RTÉ, which is unable to self-insure as bigger news organisations can afford to do.

“RTÉ needs to have a security person, we need a translator, we need a driver, cameraman, producer. They all need insurance and it becomes very expensive to cover that kind of war. You can do it maybe a week at a time. But I think it is very, very important that Irish reporters are there telling the story.”