Page 31 - bne magazine September 2023

bne September 2023 Cover Story I 31
Kommersant editor: “It's not a question of pushing press freedoms outwards, but of preventing them from shrinking inwards.”
Since the war in Ukraine began, it is hard to envy Russia's independent media. Some editorial offices were forced to leave the country, while others continued to operate from home, but have faced numerous difficulties.
If a newspaper raises the Kremlin’s ire its reporters can wind up in jail, but if they are not critical enough they can
be sanctioned by the West. The leading Russian newspaper Kommersant found itself exactly in this place after it came under pressure from both the Kremlin and ... the EU.
When the EU imposed sanctions on Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov in February 2022, it cited his ownership of the newspaper Kommersant as one of the reasons, claiming that the outlet served as a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda.
“When Mr Usmanov took control
of business daily Kommersant, the freedom of the editorial staff was curtailed and the newspaper took a manifestly pro-Kremlin stance. The Kommersant under Mr Usmanov’s ownership published a propagandist anti-Ukrainian article by Dmitry Medvedev, in which the former president of Russia argued that it was meaningless to engage in talks with the current Ukrainian authorities, who in his opinion were under direct foreign control,” the EU said in its reasoning for sanctioning the billionaire.
On the other hand, Kommersant, founded in 1989 as Russia’s first private business media outlet, is one of Russia’s best known and trusted newspapers. At one point, US government officials even worried that sanctioning Usmanov could have adverse effects on the newspaper, which they described as "one of Russia’s most independent remaining publishing companies” in a March 2022 report by the Wall Street Journal.
In an exclusive interview, Kommersant’s editor-in-chief Vladimir Zhelonkin told
bne IntelliNews that he was surprised to see the newspaper in the EU sanctions readout.
“To be frank, I don't know why we are even mentioned in this document. We have always done decent journalistic work,” Zhelonkin said by video call from his Moscow office, noting
that Kommersant was the only one
of Usmanov’s assets to receive an unconditional sanctions waiver from the United States. “Of course, the EU logic is not correct. In private talks with the EU ambassador, he expressed surprise at seeing us in the reasoning.”
The controversial article referred to
in the EU rationale was an op-ed by the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, which was published by the newspaper in 2021.
the Russian president warned about the dangers of “American exceptionalism” and called for dialogue with the US
on the war in Syria. The newspaper received domestic criticism for running the article. At the time, the paper’s editorial editor, Andrew Rosenthal, said the text “was well written, well argued. I don’t agree with many of the points in it, but that is irrelevant. Syria is a huge story and Putin is a central figure in it.”
Kommersant has a long tradition of running pieces authored by politicians and high-ranking officials, including international ones. These include
the former secretary-general for
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Thomas Greminger, President of Turkey
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, EU Council Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic, as well as a slew of European
“To be frank, I don't know why we are even mentioned in this document. We have always done decent journalistic work”
In it, Medvedev spoke out against Russian negotiations with the current Ukrainian government, which he called “not independent,” and said
the dialogue could be resumed when the country had a "sane leadership" that was ready to "build equal and mutually beneficial relations with Russia." The article was slammed by Western observers at the time for being virulently anti-Ukrainian.
“Our duty as media is not to decide what can be said, but to be a platform for discussion,” says Zhelonkin about Medvedev’s article, adding that publishing opinion pieces by current or former officials is common practice among media outlets globally. “He is
in high office and is an obvious public figure, and therefore he has the right to talk about generally discussed topics. But all opinions differ; we can’t interfere.”
In 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed by Vladimir Putin in which
ambassadors that regularly feature in the paper’s pages.
The newspaper is also known to regularly give voice to individuals branded
as "foreign agents" by the Russian government, something that carries political risk today. Introduced over a decade ago, the “foreign agent” law has been used by the Russian government
to discredit or shut down organisations and individuals that did not support the Kremlin’s policies on the grounds that they received foreign funding or support. In the last few months, Kommersant
has published more than three dozen such interviews, Zhelonkin told bne IntelliNews, with each one forced to be accompanied by the legal disclaimer that the source has been “recognised as
a foreign agent in Russia.”
Kommersant has also cited foreign NGOs that have been shut down by the Russian authorities for alleged violation of Russian laws, including
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