Russia sentences US journalist in absentia for Ukraine war comments

By Neil MacFarquhar

A Moscow court on Monday sentenced in absentia Masha A. Gessen, a Russian-born American journalist, author and New York Times staff member, to eight years in prison over comments they made about atrocities that the Russian military has been accused of committing in Ukraine.

Russian law enforcement officials charged Gessen, who lives in the United States and uses the pronoun they, in August over a 2022 interview they gave to Yuri Dud, a popular online Russian journalist. They were put on a wanted list in December.

In the interview — which was broadcast on YouTube and has been viewed more than 6.6 million times — they discussed the apparent massacre by Russian forces of hundreds of people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bucha and others. The corpses of at least 400 civilians were found in Bucha after Russian forces retreated from the city.

Russia’s Basmanny District Court found Gessen guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian military, an all-too-common tactic against critics as the Kremlin uses the courts to suppress any information about the war that diverges from the official version. Russia has accused Ukraine and its Western allies of staging the Bucha massacre.

It took the court only minutes to issue a conviction, Gessen said in an interview Monday. They join other writers wanted by Russia, including Boris Akunin and Dmitry Glukhovsky, a popular science-fiction writer.

Two American journalists have been detained in Russia.

Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been imprisoned since March 2023 and is on trial on espionage charges, which the U.S. government, his employer and he all vehemently deny. And Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American editor for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has been detained since December on charges of spreading “false information,” as well as failing to register as a foreign agent. She and her employer have called the accusations baseless.

Gessen wrote in a statement that the criminal prosecution was meant “to intimidate me and to prevent me from practicing my profession.” They also said, “To oblige a journalist to use only official sources, and even more so to use only sources on one side of a military conflict, means, in effect, to ban journalism.”

Born in Russia, Gessen, 57, immigrated to the United States as a teenager. They returned to Russia in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to work as a correspondent for various news organizations, but came back to the United States in 2013 in the face of increasing repression against members of the LGBTQ community.

Their 2017 book, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” won the National Book Award. Their other books include “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” published in 2012.

After working for years as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Gessen joined the Times as an opinion columnist in May 2024. “This conviction obviously violates even the most basic principles of freedom of expression,” Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement.

Gessen last reported from Russia in March 2022, renewing their 10-year Russian passport before leaving so they could fly back immediately, they said, particularly if the current government came to an end.