On 16 March, the FSB reported that they had arrested a spy working for Ukrainian intelligence. The detainee, they said, “conducted reconnaissance and subversive activities in the interests of the security services of Ukraine”. Their duties included “photographing and video recording of the terrain, life support facilities and places where people gathered en masse”.
On the same day, another, no less important detail of the incident was revealed: the man arrested by the FSB was a journalist from Ukraine, who had travelled to Crimea to shoot a news segment.
For about a month, neither the security services, nor the detention centre in Simferopol permitted independent lawyers to see Esipenko, a freelance journalist who worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded news media, which broadcasts to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.
According to Esipenko, after being arrested he was taken to an unknown building and put in the basement. There, he was stripped naked, and electric wires were attached to his ears. For several hours, FSB officers sent electric current through his body, demanding that he confess his ties to Ukrainian intelligence. Electric torture, the journalist said, alternated with beatings and threats “that the electric wires would be connected to his genitals”.
“I was ready to admit anything and sign any papers after this pain,” he said in a letter addressed to his lawyers. “They tortured me all night […] By morning I had made a confession on camera and signed some documents.”
Forced out of Crimea
Esipenko’s reports were published on the Crimea Realities website, a project dedicated to Crimea by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
But Esipenko is not the RFE/RL’s first journalist to be persecuted by Russian law enforcement agencies, Volodymyr Prytula, the project’s editor, says. According to Prytula’s calculations, roughly 60 journalists who have worked for RFE/RL in Crimea have suffered in one form or another in the seven years since the Russian Federation annexed the peninsula in 2014. This has included criminal prosecution, house searches of correspondents, bans on entering the peninsula, and pressure against journalists’ families, he says.
The Crimea Realities project was set up in April 2014, immediately after the annexation of Crimea. For the first six months, the editorial office was based in Simferopol. The company rented an office, journalists could go to various events, write stories and attend press conferences. However, in the summer of 2014, the project staff began to be “summoned for conversations” by Russian law enforcement, Prytula recalls.
Print
David Axelrod | Radio Free (2021-05-01T00:00:00+00:00) Seven years on from annexation, Crimean journalists are under threat. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/01/seven-years-on-from-annexation-crimean-journalists-are-under-threat/
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