Levels of physical violence against journalists in the Russian Federation are intensifying. Four murders at the start of 2009 have been succeeded recently by four more serious attacks. All of the eight victims had been reporting on corruption or criticising local politics.
One of the most shocking of the recent killings were the double murders of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasiya Baburova , lawyer and journalist respectively for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who were shot dead as they left a press conference in a Moscow street, on 20 January 2009.
Lesser known are the deaths of Sergey Protazanov and Shafig Amrakhov. Protazanov, a journalist for the newspaper Grazhdanskoye, died on 30 March 2009 amid reports that he had been badly beaten. Earlier, on 5 January, Amrakhov, editor of the online regional agency RIA 51, died from gunshot wounds. He had been shot near his home on 30 December.
Yury Grachev, editor of the weekly Solnechnogorsky Forum, a weekly had been covering corruption and had been critical of the local authorities, was reportedly attacked in the town of Solnechnogork on 3 February 2009. He was found by his neighbours unconscious and bleeding at the entrance of his home. As a consequence of Grachev’s reporting a number of local officials and businessmen were charged with corruption in 2007. It is said that Grachev’s briefcase with material for the following issue went missing during the attack.
A month later on 5 March Vladim Rogozhin, managing director of the media holding company Vzglyad, was assaulted by two unidentified men in Saratov. Rogozhin was beaten on the head in the corridor of his apartment. There was no robbery.
Days later Maxim Zolotarev, editor of the newspaper Molva Yuzhnoye Podmoskovye, distributed in Serpukhov, reported being assaulted by three unidentified men who hit him with an iron bar after discharging a gas pistol into his face while walking to his car near his flat on 12 March.
Vyacheslav Yaroshenko, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Korruptsiya i Prestupnost (Corruption and Crime), based in Rostov-on-Don, was found unconscious at the foot of a staircase at the entry to his building on 30 April 2009. Following surgery he remains in a critical condition. The police reportedly initially stated that he had been involved in a fight during the evening of 29 April, they later amended this and said that the editor hurt himself while drunk by falling down the stairs and so far refuse to register the attack as a crime.
In a 2008 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, it is stated that since 1999, 16 journalists have been murdered in the Russian Federation for reporting on cases of corruption, and that only one of these deaths had been solved. The rest of the killings, as the ones occurring this year, are yet to be investigated by the authorities.
