Netherlands – The Moscow Times, November 21, 2024
Alsu Kurmasheva, a longtime journalist for the U.S.-funded RFE/RL news outlet’s Tatar-Bashkir service, became the second U.S. journalist to be jailed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when she was detained in October 2023.
The dual U.S.-Russian citizen, who lives in Prague, was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison in July on charges of spreading “false information” about the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine that her family and employer denied. Just weeks later on Aug. 1, she was freed in a historic prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.
Ahead of accepting the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award in New York, Kurmasheva spoke to The Moscow Times about her experience in prison, the prisoner swap, life since being released and raising awareness for her imprisoned colleagues.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Moscow Times: Before your arrest, you worked for Radio Free Europe’s Tatar-Bashkir service, where you covered issues facing these Indigenous communities and human rights. Considering the intensified pressure on Indigenous activism since the invasion, it seems like this may have been one of the reasons why you were targeted. Would you say so?
AK: I’ve been working as a journalist for Radio Free Europe for more than 20 years. … I saw my mission there to give a voice to the Tatar community who had no free media, no resources and not even education to openly speak. It’s like centuries of oppression. The Radio Free Europe Tatar-Bashkir service was really great in its mission. I loved every minute and every day of working, I loved every project.
There were better times in terms of press freedom, there were worse times. During better times, my radio shows were on local FM stations in Kazan and people would recognize my voice. There were worse times during the Cold War, but I knew about them only from books and archives, and the worse times for press freedom are now. The journalists at RFE have always faced those risks because they’re a media company with more than 70 years of history broadcasting to countries where there is no press freedom. There have been journalists who have been imprisoned who have been harassed. … There were certain risks, of course. But nobody would think that the Russian authorities would go so far as to imprison a journalist, a mother of two children, a woman in her native Tatarstan, in her native Kazan where people know me.
