Russia Sentences Another US Journalist

A court has convicted Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American journalist for the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, of spreading false information about the Russian army and sentenced her to 6.5 years in prison after a secret trial, court records and officials said Monday.

• RFE/RL President and CEO Stephen Capus denounced the trial and conviction of Kurmasheva as "a mockery of justice." "The only just outcome is for Alsu to be immediately released from prison by her Russian captors," he said in a statement to the AP. "It's beyond time for this American citizen, our dear colleague, to be reunited with her loving family," Capus said.

• Kurmasheva, a 47-year-old editor for RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir language service, was convicted of spreading false information about the military, according to the website of the Supreme Court of Tatarstan. Kurmasheva was ordered to serve the sentence in a medium-security penal colony, court spokesperson Natalya Loseva said.
• Kurmasheva, who holds US and Russian citizenship and lives in Prague with her husband and two daughters, was taken into custody in October 2023 and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military. Later, she was also charged with spreading false information about the Russian military under legislation that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war in Ukraine that deviates from the Kremlin line.

• Kurmasheva was initially stopped in June 2023 at Kazan International Airport after traveling to Russia the previous month to visit her ailing elderly mother. Officials confiscated her US and Russian passports and fined her for failing to register her US passport. She was waiting for her passports to be returned when she was arrested on new charges.
• "My daughters and I know Alsu has done nothing wrong. And the world knows it too. We need her home," Kurmasheva's husband, Pavel Butorin, said in a post on X. He had said last year the charges stemmed from a book the Tatar-Bashkir service released in 2022 called No to War—"a collection of short stories of Russians who don't want their country to be at war with Ukraine."
• The conviction in Kazan, the capital of Russia's central region of Tatarstan, came on Friday, the same day a court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison in a case that the US called politically motivated.

(More Alsu Kurmasheva stories.)