Word: meier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...routinely subjected to such harassment by the Russian authorities as Moscow has tried to enforce its own Pollyannaish spin on a military campaign designed for domestic political consumption. "Foreign reporters are typically detained briefly while Russian reporters are often detained at length," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "Even reporters for state-owned television have been detained. This is the blunt edge of the news blockade." But Babitsky's case came to represent a new low in Moscow's contempt for the media when the Russian military announced, last Thursday, that it had turned the journalist over - supposedly...
...Babitsky away are in fact Chechens at all. And when the liberal Yabloko faction tried Wednesday to raise questions about the incident in the Duma, they found themselves blocked by a majority loyal to acting president Vladimir Putin. "Putin himself has maintained an unseemly silence throughout this affair," says Meier...
...Moscow's official version is alarming. "It's impossible right now to determine what has happened to Babitsky, but if you take the Russian government at its word, they handed over a Russian journalist to a group of hooded men Moscow regards as terrorists," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "That means that neither his profession as a journalist nor his Russian citizenship meant anything to the Russian state. There's no question that the intended message to all reporters covering the war is that Moscow regards journalists who don't toe the line as part of the enemy...
...Babitsky would certainly not have been surprised by finding himself under arrest by Russian troops. "He's a fiercely driven correspondent willing to take great risks to get a story," says Meier. "As an unflinching witness to war, he had filed some of the hardest-hitting stuff out of Chechnya, which had 'displeased' the Russian authorities, to put it mildly. And when I met with him the night before he left for Grozny, he said he believed there was a special FSB [successor organization to the KGB] team in Ingushetia whose mission was to eliminate...
...Still, there's no certainty either way about his fate. "Each day in this story brings a confounding new turn of events," says Meier. "One day everyone denies knowing where he is; the next day everybody claims to know where he is. But the naked cynicism of the official explanation may be cause for alarm...