Russia Sentences U.S. Journalist in Absentia for Ukraine War Comments

A Moscow court on Monday sentenced in absentia Masha A. Gessen, the Russian-born American journalist, author and New York Times staff member, to eight years in prison over comments they made about atrocities that the Russian military has been accused of committing in Ukraine.

Russian law enforcement officials charged Mx. Gessen, who lives in the United States and uses the pronoun they, in August over a 2022 interview they gave to Yuri Dud, a popular online Russian journalist. They were put on a wanted list in December.

In the interview — which was broadcast on YouTube and has been viewed more than 6.6 million times — they discussed the apparent massacre by Russian forces of hundreds of people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bucha and others. The corpses of at least 400 civilians were found in Bucha after Russian forces retreated from the city.

Russia’s Basmanny District Court found Mx. Gessen guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian military, an all-too-common tactic against critics as the Kremlin uses the courts to suppress any information about the war that diverges from the official version. Russia has accused Ukraine and its Western allies of staging the Bucha massacre.

It took the court only minutes to issue a conviction, Mx. Gessen said in an interview on Monday. They join various other writers wanted by Russia, including Boris Akunin and Dmitry Glukhovsky, a popular science-fiction writer.

Two American journalists have been detained in Russia.

Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been imprisoned since March 2023 and is on trial on espionage charges, which the U.S. government, his employer and he all vehemently deny. And Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual Russian American an editor for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has been detained since December on charges of spreading “false information,” as well as failing to register as a foreign agent. She and her employer have called the accusations baseless.