The BBC Moscow correspondent used her last letter before being deported Russia The Kremlin warned that the country is “regressing” in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Sarah Rainsford recorded the moment she was pulled aside by the airport authorities on the way back to Moscow and informed the Russian Federal Security Service that she had been banned from leaving the country for life.
“Do I look like a threat? I am a reporter,” Rainsford told officials, and one of the officials told her: “I know, I know. We checked all the information about you.”
Rainsford first came to the Soviet Union when he was a teenager, and has been reporting in Russia for more than two decades, depicting the reign of Vladimir Putin.
After returning from Belarus, she was stopped at Moscow airport, where she asked the president of the country and supporters of Putin’s ally Alexander Lukashenko about his regime’s massive suppression of peaceful protesters, which angered his support By.
exist Her last dispatch, She reported and talked to Russian journalists who complained about the deterioration of press freedom in the country. This includes a reporter from Dozhd TV, which has been added to a growing number of entities’ “blacklists”, who, she said, must declare their “hostile” status every time they publish any news.
“I want to leave the country I came to for the first time, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and freedom of speech or freedom was new and precious at the time. It feels like today’s Russia is reversing,” Rainsford said at the end of her report. Say.
Rainsford was allowed to enter Russia by the airport authorities after being intercepted, but only packed and was told that her visa would not be renewed. She was told it was because of what happened to a Russian journalist in London two years ago.
In recounting her conversations with Russian government officials, she said that they have consistently referred to her deportation as “not personal.”
She said in the report: “They have always called this a reciprocal move, but they even refused to acknowledge the fact that I was labeled a national security threat.”
“They said this is just a technical move, but when Russia sees more and more enemies around it, it really feels like I have been added to the list now.”
Reporters Without Borders stated that since anti-government protests in 2011 and 2012, Russia’s pressure on independent media has steadily increased, citing so-called stringent laws, website blocking, and “control or strangulation” of major news media.
this British Broadcasting Corporation Said that it is continuing to work hard to reverse Russia’s decision. The broadcaster’s director-general Tim David said earlier this month that the eviction was a direct attack on media freedom.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova issued a copy earlier this month statement According to her personal Telegram account, Rainsford’s visa has been “withdrawn indefinitely.”
Zakharova added that this was in retaliation for the British authorities’ refusal to extend a visa to a journalist of an unnamed Russian news agency in 2019 and to refuse to provide a visa for any substitute.
The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) stated that “Russian journalists continue to work freely in the UK, provided that they act within the legal and regulatory framework.”
