“I’ll write to everyone. Keep writing to me. I love you!” Ivan Safronov called out from the glass cage where defendants sit in Russian courtrooms, moments after a judge sentenced him to 22 years in prison. He was wearing a black vest and grey sweatpants. Then he was led away.
The sentence, handed down in Moscow on Monday, September 5, 2022, was for treason. A further two years of strict probation will follow his release, which could come in 2042 given the time he has already served. The Guardian called it a record sentence. Safronov stared straight ahead as it was read.
A trial on secret evidence
Safronov is a former defence reporter for the Kommersant and Vedomosti dailies. He was tried on secret evidence. Case files revealed by the investigative outlet Proekt showed that much of the case against him drew on public data in his own articles, along with alleged ties to foreigners that were never backed up. A panel of judges reached its decision quickly.
Russian officials said they had caught Safronov “finding out and collecting secret and top-secret information,” including on military-technical cooperation with members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and with countries in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) saw it differently. Investigators found “state secrets” in seven analytical articles that Safronov sent to Czech journalist Martin Larysh and German political analyst Dmitri Voronin, RSF said. Yet all of the supposedly secret information was already online before he wrote them, with one exception: a piece on technical problems tied to reconnaissance satellite trials. That detail became public less than two months later through a Moscow arbitration court decision, according to Proekt’s research. His analysis of T-72 tanks and BRDM-2 armoured vehicles going to Serbia, for example, relied on material from the state news agency RIA Novosti and the Russian defence ministry.
His defence team believes he was targeted for revealing details of a possible sale of 20 Su-35 fighters to Egypt. The deal fell through, and the Egyptian military leadership lodged a protest with Russia.
Pressure to confess
Investigators leaned hard on him to confess. At a final hearing, a prosecutor offered to recommend a 12-year sentence if he did. He refused, and the prosecution asked for 24 years instead. “He told them to get lost,” his lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told the Guardian.
His lawyer said the verdict would chill Russian journalism and show that “for good, legal journalism work, you can go to prison for a long time.” RSF said Safronov had been held in temporary detention for more than two years, since his arrest on 7 July 2020, and that his lawyers were prevented from defending him and became targets of the intelligence services themselves.
Several hundred people attended the hearing. Many were journalists, and they applauded as the court adjourned. Some cried and hugged in the corridors and on the street after the verdict. Most of Russia’s independent media signed a public statement calling the decision “unjust and politically motivated.” It ended: “Journalism is not a crime.”
In his final statement before sentencing, Safronov said: “The whole world will see that they want to put a journalist in jail for writing articles.” A guilty verdict, he added, “means to end the topic of freedom of speech for a long time, if not for ever.” And if prison was his fate, he said, “I will serve my sentence with honour and dignity.”
Katerina Gordeeva, a journalist who made a short film about the case, called it “one of the most closed and strangest cases in recent Russian judicial history.” Safronov’s mother had told her: “He won’t break. He has a tough core. He can handle it.”
Sources
- Russian journalist Ivan Safronov sentenced to 22 years in prison
- Russian journalist Ivan Safronov sentenced to 22 years in prison: “The absurd and inconsistent indictment shows that he is being punished just for doing his job”
