When 40-year-old Svetlana Prokopyeva penned her column about an October 2018 suicide bombing by a 17-year-old student at the Federal Security Service (FSB) offices in Arkhangelsk, Russia, she had no inkling of what she would be bringing on herself, VOA news <a href="https://www.voanews.com/europe/rights-groups-highlight-case-russian-journalist-facing-prison">reports</a>. 



The perpetrator killed himself in the blast and injured three FSB officers, announcing beforehand on an anarchist chat forum that he was doing so because the security agency “fabricates cases and tortures people.”



Prokopyeva tried in her commentary to enter the state of mind of the teenage bomber, to analyze his motives, arguing the Russian government’s repressive policies and its squelching of dissent and opposition was to blame. “A young citizen who has only seen prohibitions and punishments from the government in his life has not been able to invent any other means of communication. Cruelty breeds cruelty. The ruthless state has created a citizen whose only argument is death,” she wrote.



Now Prokopyeva, who works in the northwestern Russian city of Pskov for the independent Moscow-based radio station Ekho Moskvy and is a freelance reporter for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is facing a possible seven year jail term. Her apartment was raided by the security services, her laptops, phones and flash drives taken, and in July her name was added to an official list of “extremists and terrorists,” allowing the authorities to block her bank accounts and credit cards.



Last month, she was charged formally with publicly justifying terrorism and banned from traveling beyond the Pskov region. Journalists covering her case have complained they have been harassed.



Her case has prompted an international outcry by journalist organizations. The European Federation of Journalists dubs her case an “obvious attempt to intimidate journalists” and has called on the Russian government to stop misusing terrorism legislation to silence reporters.



Rights groups are highlighting her case as yet another example of the increasingly reduced space authorities are permitting independent journalists in a media landscape dominated by outlets owned by the state or Kremlin-linked oligarchs.



Last week, Russia’s few remaining independent news outlets published an open letter written by Prokopyeva in which she said that as the possibility of a criminal case against her was growing ever more likely she and her colleagues “just laughed and called the bureaucrats crazy. Where in hell was this ‘justification of terrorism’”?



Speaking to VOA via an encrypted messaging app — she has been tipped off her home phone is bugged — Prokopyeva said even Russia’s independent journalists are becoming “accustomed to filter information,” or self-censorship. Now apparently “it is impossible to analyze a terrorist attack, because the government can consider it a justification of terrorism,’” she says.



“My column was in accordance with the law. There’s no slander, the opinions are not formed as facts. Since we have freedom of speech in our Constitution, I thought I had rights to express my opinion and I did. Roskomnadzor (Federal Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Media&nbsp;Regulatory Authority) hasn’t cited any exact words or phrases, where it saw justification of terrorism,” she says.



She says she was surprised by the reaction of the authorities and might think twice about writing such a commentary again. The police raid, she said, was humiliating.



“They came around 12 p.m, I had just came from Moscow where I was presenting a book about the Pskov region. They didn’t talk much to me. There was a crowd in my apartment, I was just sitting on the chair, they said: ‘here’s a warrant to search, we start.’ They checked literally everything, each paper, all laptops, searched all my belongings. This procedure is nasty. It took around five or six hours,” she says.



Intimidation&nbsp;



Journalists covering her case also face difficulties. Last week, Pskov authorities summoned the editor of Ekho Moskvy’s Pskov affiliate, and the editor of a local independent news-site, after both outlets published Prokopyeva’s open letter. The editors say they were interrogated but are not able to elaborate more because of a non-disclosure agreement they were required to sign.



“The prosecution of journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva and the intimidation and harassment of journalists reporting on her case shows how far Russian authorities will go to silence independent voices,” according to the New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists. “The charges against Prokopyeva should be dropped and other journalists must be allowed to cover her case freely,” the organization said in a statement.



Prokopyeva’s case is not the only one prompting the growing alarm of Russia’s independent media. Last week, the website of the Fergana Russian news agency, an outlet mainly covering the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, was blocked by Roskomnadzor without any justification offered.



The move was condemned by the rights group Amnesty International as “another arbitrary attack on freedom of expression in Russia.” &nbsp;



“The authorities may have believed that they could silence Fergana without anybody noticing, but they are wrong. Independent media outlets such as Fergana are rare in Russia but, to the authorities’ annoyance, they have a dedicated audience in Russia and beyond,” said Amnesty International’s Russia Director Natalia Zviagina.

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Rights Groups Highlight Case of Russian Journalist Facing Prison

Mnews.world is publishing an open letter by Pskov-based journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, who is being charged with public justifying of terrorism (part 2 of the article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) for sayingthat suppression of a protest inevitably leads to its radicalization.



I (we?) am Svetlana Prokopyeva. I’m a journalist and I can go to prison for
seven years for “justifying terrorism”.



Nearly a year ago an explosion
thundered in Arkhangelsk. A sudden, overwhelming explosion: a 17-year-old
Mikhail Zhlobitksiy blew himself up at FSB’s Arkhangelsk office. A few moments
before the explosion he left a suicide note in Telegram. He wrote that he would
blow himself up because “FSB is *** [out of line], they frame up cases and
torture people”.



I made this Arkhangelsk
explosion the topic of my author’s column on the radio station Echo of Moscow
in Pskov. “Acting voluntarily”, I wrote a text titled “Repression for the state”.
The program was broadcast on November 7 and the transcript was later published
on Pskov News Feed website.



Almost a month later, Pskov
News Feed and Echo of Moscow received Roskomnadzor warnings: our quasi-censor
spotted the “signs of justifying terrorism” in my text. In early December, the
respective administrative offense reports were drawn up resulting in a
350-thousand-ruble fine awarded to the mass media outlets by the magistrate’s
court. At the same time, Pskov Investigative Committee started checking me in
regard to article 205.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. A
possibility of a criminal case has come into view but we laughed at the thought
of it, twisting finger at a temple. Where on earth could they see the justification
of terrorism? Roskomnadzor hasn’t mentioned in any of their warnings a single
phrase or word that would be treated as a “sign” of it, and could simply not do
that as there weren’t any. As it turned out later, it doesn’t matter. 



On February 6, I opened the
door to find a dozen of armed men wearing helmets, who then used their shields
to push me back against the wall in the outer room. That was how I found out
that the criminal case against me was actually started.



The search is an odious and
humiliating procedure. Some strangers go through your personal stuff, other
strangers stare blankly at it. Old notes, cash register receipts, letters with
foreign stamps – all of these suddenly raise suspicion and require explanation.
Your most important and precious belongings – a laptop, a phone – become “pieces
of evidence”. Your colleagues or family members can easily become “accomplices”.



That day I was robbed: they
took away three laptops, two phones, a tape recorder, USB flash drives. Six
months later they robbed me again by freezing my accounts. I was only a “suspect”
when they put me on the list of active extremists and terrorists of Rosfinmonitoring.
Now I can’t get a bank card in my name, open a deposit account or take out a
mortgage. The state has erased me from normal economic life.



The only thing I had left was
my freedom but then, on September 20, my procedural status changed. Today I’m
officially accused of committing a crime on the article 205.2 of the Criminal
Code: justification of terrorism using mass media. This means I’m facing a fine
up to a million rubles or up to 7 years in prison. 



I do not admit guilt and think
of this criminal case as an act of revenge done by resentful enforcers. In my
text, I put the blame for Arkhangelsk explosion on them. I wrote that the state’s
repressions provoked a backlash. That violent law enforcement strategy makes people
violent. That when blocked by the law, the energy of protests finds vent in
such publicly dangerous ways. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">If you are not afraid, post this quote:“Strong state, Strong president, strong governor. A country, where the power belongs to the enforcers.”Arkhangelsk bomber belonged to the generation that grew up in this environment. They know that they can’t go to rallies or they will be cleared away, beaten and pursued in court. They know that one-man protests are being punished. They can see that it’s only safe to be a member of a certain set of parties, and there’s a certain set of opinions that can be expressed without fear. This generation learned from real-life cases that court is not a place to seek justice: the judge will award a judgment to support whatever the major decides is right.</blockquote>



Years and years of restricting
the political and civil freedoms have turned Russia into a not simply unfree,
but a repressive state. A state that is dangerous and daunting to deal with.”



I still hold the same opinion.
Moreover, I believe that this criminal case is another proof of my points. “Punishment.
Proving guilt and putting on trial is their only goal. A tiny formal peg is
enough to get a man caught between the wheels of the justice system.”



I didn’t justify terrorism. I
analyzed what caused the act of terrorism. I tried to understand why a young
man with a whole life ahead of him went in for a suicide crime. I might have
been mistaken about his motives – and I’d be happy if I were! – but nobody has
proved me wrong. Accusation instead of discussion is a quite primitive and
rough position. It is a punch to the face in reply to a verbal warning.



It is a punch to the face of
every journalist in our country.



You can never know the exact
words or word order which may offend a high-powered enforcer. They called voicing
opinions a crime. They turn a person who is simply doing her job into a
criminal.



In the same way, a criminal
case can be fabricated from any more or less straight-from-the-shoulder text.
It only takes to find the “experts” to sign an expert assessment that the
investigator needs. Knowing all this, will you dare cover a burning topic? Will
you ask the questions that can most likely drive the government mad? Will you
go in for bringing a crime home to someone wearing a police uniform?



My criminal case is the murder
of the freedom of speech. Seeing how things turned out for me, dozens and
hundreds of other journalists will not have the courage to tell the truth
before it’s too late.

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Svetlana Prokopyeva: “My prosecution is the murder of the freedom of speech”