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The Russians are coming the Russians are coming
4/28/2014 7:04:35 PM
Тhe worst abuses have taken place in regions seized by Russian troops and local proxies on the ground. In Crimea, anonymous gunmen harassed dozens of journalists, Ukrainian and foreign. According to Human Rights Watch, some have seized laptops and cameras. Ukraine's Russian-language newspaper Vesti has been forced to shut its bureaus in Simferopol, Crimea's administrative capital, and Sevastopol.
In the rebel eastern stronghold of Slavyansk, meanwhile, pro-Russian militia have kidnapped around 40 people. Their hostages include a large number of Ukrainian journalists who had come to the town in an attempt to report the news. Also held are seven European military observers. (An eighth was released on Sunday. The US correspondent Simon Ostrovsky, also taken, was freed last Thursday.) The prospects for the Ukrainians are grim. A masked gunman paraded one of them, Irma Krat, blindfolded, in front of the city hall. She and the others are still in prison.
Venturing into Slavyansk these days is a perilous business. There are rumours that the rebels have drawn up a list of "hostile" correspondents. Russian media representatives, by contrast, are free to report.
Lazorenko, a historian by training and the son of a Soviet journalist, launched his news portal five years ago. At first its readership was modest – 1,000 people a day. Now it gets 40,000 hits, and sometimes more. But its future is in doubt. On Monday Lavorenko decided not to open up his central office, which overlooks Donetsk's Donbass Arena football stadium. A tipoff said activists were visiting news organisations to check that their demands had been fulfilled. Lazorenko said he and his three fellow journalists could work from home, but the ad staff could not, and revenues were suffering.
"We know their demands. They want us to remove the inverted commas from 'Donetsk People's Republic'," he said. "There's a clear attempt to impose censorship and to destroy or scare away independent journalists."
What would happen if the pro-Russian militia took power? "It will be murder," he predicted. Lazorenko said he used to get calls from journalists across the border in Russia who said they envied Ukraine's record on freedom of speech. "They don't say that any more," he said.
By Luke Harding
Source: The Guardian
Kavkaz Center
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