Speaking the truth can get you killed in Russia these days.Ivan Safronov, a military affairs writer for the daily Kommersant, fell to his death from a fifth storey window in the stairwell of his Moscow apartment building on Friday.
He had been working on a report that Russia planned to secretly sell advanced weaponry to Syria. He told colleagues that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s successor which in the past accused Mr. Safranov of revealing state secrets in his reporting, had warned him he faced a criminal investigation if he went ahead.
The suggestion that Mr. Safronov committed suicide – floated by some in Russia – is not credible. Those who knew him described him as a happy man who loved his work.
Moreover, Mr. Safronov is just the latest in a large number of journalists, and other critics, who have ended up dead after openly questioning Vladimir Putin and his government’s policies, exposing corruption or revealing human rights abuses, especially in Chechnya.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 42 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992, many in contract-style executions. Most cases remain unsolved.
During Mr. Putin’s rule, more than a dozen journalists openly critical of his policies have been killed, including human rights investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment in October...
This editorial from the Chronicle Herald in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is an excellent commentary on the recently released "Killing the Messengers," a report published by the International News Safety Institute which described 1000 journalists' deaths between January 1996 and June 2006.
"In many countries, murder has become the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of silencing troublesome reporting, and the more the killers get away with it the more the spiral of death is forced upwards," Rodney Pinder, Director of INSI, said in the report.
Russia, which saw 88 reporters murdered over the past 10 years, is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to work. It is second only to Iraq, where 138 media personnel have been killed over the same period.