Earlier this month, Russian social media posts indicated that something significant might be happening at the border between the region of Kursk and Ukraine. “Everything was a little bit vague,” Andrew Kramer, a reporter at the New York Times, recalled on the paper’s Daily podcast last week. “We were seeing reports of fighting along the border, but nothing indicating the scale of what was to come.” It soon transpired that Ukrainian forces had executed a surprise raid on Russian territory, held it, and kept going. Kramer and colleagues drove an armored car to the border area and crept closer to the border itself, eventually arriving at what was left of a Russian administrative building. Ukrainian soldiers were on the scene in surgical masks. Kramer realized that they were “clearing the bodies of dead Russians.”
Other journalists would go deeper into the territory that Ukraine was occupying—and Russia would freak out about it. After Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini, two journalists with the Italian public broadcaster RAI, became the first foreign media to report from Sudzha, a town six miles or so inside Russia, the country’s foreign minister summoned the Italian ambassador and accused Battistini and Traini of illegally crossing the border. (RAI pulled the journalists out of Russia, citing their safety.) Americans were soon implicated in a similar dynamic: Russian officials hauled in a US diplomat and complained about the “provocative actions” of American journalists on Russian soil, adding that their presence helped prove “the involvement of the United States as a direct participant in the conflict”; the officials didn’t initially specify which journalists they were talking about, but have since opened a case against Nick Paton Walsh, a correspondent for CNN, and have reportedly threatened similar action against staffers with the Washington Post. At the same time, officials opened similar proceedings against two Ukrainian journalists. This morning, they said that they’d done likewise against another Ukrainian media worker and one from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. Those affected, Russia has said, will go on an international wanted list.
It is, clearly, nonsense to suggest that any journalists for US outlets who may have followed Ukrainian troops into Russia were doing so under direct orders from the American government; indeed, the US has actively discouraged its citizens from traveling to Russia, including for “reporting purposes.” And Russia’s charges of illegal border crossing are grotesquely hypocritical. Not only have Russian forces invaded Ukraine, but journalists and war bloggers have frequently followed them into the territory that they have occupied, as the Post recently pointed out. Several appear to have been killed there under Ukrainian rocket fire.
On last week’s episode of The Daily, Michael Barbaro, the host, pointed out that Russia is obsessed with its borders. Its recent treatment of Battistini, Traini, Paton Walsh, and the others would seem to attest to that. And yet, initially, the country’s response to Ukraine’s occupation of its territory was to downplay it in state-run media; also speaking on The Daily, Anton Troianovski, who covers Russia for the Times, said that the invasion was being presented not as part of the Ukraine war but as a “natural disaster,” with footage of vigils and aid supplies. “The strategy is kind of self-denial,” Barbaro said. “If Russia doesn’t treat this like an invasion, it’s not an invasion.”
The way the Kursk episode has played out so far—in general terms and for specific journalists covering it—reflects a broader, messy reality of a war in which borders can appear both as bright red lines but also as fragile and contingent. This is, at least, true of the media story behind the war. Even beyond the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk, recent days have furnished several reminders of this state of affairs. Some of these have been murky; several have shown how the war and related issues have affected journalists—and the broader informational air they breathe—in democratic lands far beyond Russia’s borders. We’ve also been reminded, again, of the shocking clarity that war can visit on its victims.
As I wrote a year ago, the media story of the war has often appeared to abide by an inside/outside dynamic: Russia clamped down on media within its borders (including by smearing reporters and whole outlets as treacherous “agents” of foreign powers); many independent journalists fled over those borders and into exile. But this dynamic has long been messy and porous. Democratic European governments have not always played welcoming hosts to exiled Russian reporters; last year, researchers suggested that one such government may have planted potent spyware on the phone of an independent Russian editor while she was in Germany (though the culpability for this was murky). Meanwhile, two exiled Russian journalists in Europe reported symptoms of poisoning—an episode that was itself murky, and has remained so, but palpably undermined the idea, if it was ever tenable, that escaping Russia’s borders means escaping Russian threats. Inside Russia, some foreign reporters felt more freedom to do their jobs than their domestic counterparts—but this idea was punctured, too, after Russia moved last year to arrest Evan Gershkovich, of the Wall Street Journal, and Alsu Kurmasheva, of the US broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Earlier this month, Russia freed Gershkovich and Kurmasheva as part of a wider prisoner swap. But even this good news came tinged with concern—that Russia had gotten away with taking hostages for diplomatic leverage, and that the latter is becoming a disturbing (if, again, often murky) international trend. And broadly, the porous inside/outside dynamic that I wrote about a year ago has persisted. Russia has continued to clamp down on both domestic and foreign media within its borders, the latter in the form of expulsions and bans. More infections with spyware have been reported on exiled journalists’ phones in Europe. And in recent months in particular, Russian authorities have pursued legal proceedings against more than a dozen exiled journalists, up to and including spurious convictions in absentia.
These, clearly, make it hard for those targeted to return to Russia, but have also, in some cases, had broader global ramifications. Last month, the US journalist Masha Gessen was convicted in absentia for comments they made about the Russian military, and sentenced to eight years in prison; since then, they have faced complications in securing a visa to travel to Australia after officials there asked them to furnish documents from Russian police as part of their application. The visa was eventually approved, but Gessen noted that the incident had played into Russia’s hands. “This is a very concerted campaign for making Russian dissidents feel unsafe and unfree and constraining our movement in the world,” they said, “and this is not the first time a Western government has become unwittingly complicit in this.”
In recent days, Western governments have faced questions over issues linked to Russia that don’t revolve around independent journalism directly, but have raised concerns about free speech in which independent journalists are deeply invested. Over the weekend, French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, a Russian-born French and Emirati citizen who founded the messaging app Telegram, upon his arrival at an airport in Paris. Among many other things, Telegram has been a central platform in the dissemination of information about the war in Ukraine, on both sides—including both propaganda and factual news. The reasons for Durov’s detention remain unclear. He appears to be being held over allegations involving his platform’s failure to stop the facilitation of a broad range of crimes, from child exploitation to drug trafficking; Emmanuel Macron, the French president, insisted yesterday that the country respects free expression, and some observers don’t seem overly concerned that it is being infringed. But others do seem concerned; their number includes the likes of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson (who noted, predictably, that Durov has been locked up not by Putin but by a Western democracy), but also free-expression watchers outside of the political right, who have at least urged the French government to shed more light on the case.
Meanwhile, the Times reported last week that the US government is investigating Americans who have worked with Russian state media (one of whom traveled this year both to Russia and territory that it is occupying in Ukraine). The terms of this probe are also murky; the Times reported that it involves potential violations of US laws concerning sanctions and registration requirements for foreign agents, but also noted that it could raise First Amendment concerns since the Americans in question are working with news organizations, however propagandistic. Over the weekend, I put the latter concerns to several close observers of Russia and US speech laws; all of them suggested that it’s hard to know exactly what to make of the probe in the absence of further details, but Seth Stern, the director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, urged US officials to tread carefully in a general sense. “The government needs to be extremely cautious in drawing subjective distinctions between journalists, propagandists and alleged lobbyists, especially when doing so in order to punish people who criticize US policy,” Stern told me in a statement. “If the government is just looking for petty ways to mess with foreign adversaries, it should find another option that doesn’t potentially endanger press freedom.”
These two stories involve issues that predate, and remain broader than, the war in Ukraine: global debates about content moderation on social platforms, in the first case, and concerns about Russian election meddling in the US, in the second. It should also be noted that there is no equivalence between independent journalism and state-sanctioned propaganda. But the war remains such a huge story (even if the Western news cycle doesn’t always elevate it as such these days) that it factors into any discussion around Russia, speech, and journalism. And these disparate stories all show that that discussion transcends the territory of Ukraine and Russia—even if it is, still, felt most painfully on the ground.
Over the weekend, a missile hit a hotel housing journalists and other civilians in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, a short distance from the current front lines of the war inside Ukraine. Reuters reported that two of its journalists were injured and that another staffer was missing—then confirmed that Ryan Evans, a British military veteran who was working for the agency as a safety adviser, had been found dead in the rubble. According to the Kyiv Independent, at least one of the journalists injured in the attack remains in serious condition in the hospital. News organizations could not immediately confirm the provenance of the strike, but Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said it was Russian—and deliberate.
Since then, Russia has rained strikes on other cities in Ukraine; yesterday, reports circulated that a missile had hit a hotel in the city of Kryvyi Rih, which has reportedly also been frequented by journalists and humanitarian workers. (At least two people were killed.) Overall, the blitz, Kramer and his Times colleague Matthew Mpoke Bigg report today, has been one of the biggest of the war so far. Russian military bloggers have suggested that the bombardment is a response to the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk. The reality, once again, remains murky.
Other notable stories:
- For Vanity Fair, Joel Simon, who led the Committee to Protect Journalists when Donald Trump was president, assesses the risks for press freedom of Trump returning to office. During his first term, “the Justice Department pursued several secret leak investigations into leading news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN,” Simon writes. “In his campaign for a second term, Trump has twice discussed scenarios for jailing journalists in the course of leak investigations and implied that the threat of a prison rape could get them to cough up their sources.” To understand “what Trump might be capable of,” Simon argues, “it’s worth reviewing what he attempted to do in the first term—and why he failed.”
- In recent days, Trump has cast doubt on his participation in the debate scheduled for September 10 on ABC; Trump often shows public displeasure, of course, but Politico reported yesterday that his team has privately been at loggerheads with Kamala Harris’s over whether microphones should be muted when the candidates aren’t talking, as they were in the debate between Trump and Joe Biden in June. (Harris’s camp now wants mics unmuted; Trump suggested publicly yesterday that he doesn’t care either way.) Meanwhile, Politico asks this morning whether Harris will schedule a big interview before August is out, as she previously suggested she would.
- In media-business news, Gannett said that it will soon shut down Reviewed, a product-review site that it owns; staff are expected to be “impacted,” though it’s not yet clear exactly how. Mia Sato has more details for The Verge (including on recent controversies involving Reviewed content). Elsewhere, ESPN announced a significant reorganization of its executive ranks. And Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the LA Times, appeared to publicly criticize a deal that California politicians struck with Google to steer cash to news and AI development. We noted the deal last week.
- In yesterday’s newsletter, I noted the recent resurfacing of an old interview in which the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who just suspended his third-party presidential bid, recounted her father severing the head of a dead whale with a chainsaw and driving with it to New York (while “whale juice” leaked into his vehicle). Now an environmental group is asking federal officials to investigate whether Kennedy violated animal-protection laws, adding that the story “made it seem like this was normal behavior for him.”
- And New York’s Brock Colyar profiled the pop star Charli XCX, whose album Brat has made a defining contribution to the vibes of this summer (including in politics). “Lying is so fun, so brat,” she told Colyar, adding, “Who made this rule that you have to be truthful and honest in the press as an artist? The press is just a tool.” Charli is “well aware that you can’t be omnipresent forever,” she said, but “the press and outlets don’t get to decide when it’s over. The kids get to decide when it’s over.”
ICYMI: Evan and Alsu are free. Vladyslav, Ihar, and Andrey are not.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.