Russia issues arrest warrant for trans non-binary journalist over reporting on Ukraine

Russian authorities on Friday issued an arrest warrant for nonbinary Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, 56, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin who fled the country in 2013 following the imposition of the first in a series of notorious anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda laws in the country.

Independent Russian news outlet Mediazona first reported Gessen’s profile had been added to the Russian Interior Ministry’s wanted list. 

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“I wanted to find moments that unite all of us despite our orientation.”

The arrest warrant follows a charge by Moscow earlier this year that the nonbinary journalist spread “false information” about Russia’s war on Ukraine during an interview with a prominent Russian journalist in 2022.

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That interview discussed the atrocities committed in Bucha near Kyiv by retreating Russian forces early in the war. In March 2022, Ukrainian troops discovered the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children on the streets of Bucha, in yards and homes, and in mass graves, many showing evidence of torture.  

Russia denies culpability in the massacre and has prosecuted Russian public figures for claiming otherwise.

Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, nearly 21,000 people have been detained for protesting the war or been implicated in criminal cases over anti-war sentiments, according to the OVD-Info rights group, a Russian human rights media project that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid in the country.

Gessen holds dual Russian and American citizenship and lives in the U.S. While their arrest is unlikely, a Russian court could try them in absentia, with a guilty verdict earning a sentence of up to 15 years in prison for violating the country’s ban on disseminating “knowingly false information” about the Russian military, imposed shortly after the Ukraine invasion.

Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Their book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017.

In November, Moscow imposed the latest in a series of anti-LGBTQ+ “propaganda laws,” labeling LGBTQ+ people and activists as “extremist threats” to the nation and essentially banning any public expression of LGBTQ+ identity. The new law has enabled a government crackdown on LGBTQ+ activism in the country, while local police are raiding and shutting down gay gathering spaces like bars, clubs, and saunas.

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