MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Thursday that it had withdrawn accreditation from Le Monde’s Moscow correspondent Benjamin Quénelle due to Paris’s refusal to issue a visa to a Russian reporter, leaving the paper without a presence in Moscow for the first time since the 1950s.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow had repeatedly warned that it would retaliate over France’s refusal to accredit a journalist from Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
She said Quénelle had been the casualty not because of any “political sub-text” but because his accreditation had required a “technical extension”.
Le Monde criticised what it said was the “covert expulsion of our journalist”.
“For the first time since 1957, Le Monde is prevented from having a correspondent based in Moscow,” Jérôme Fenoglio, its director, wrote in an article in the paper.
“Le Monde condemns this disguised expulsion of our journalist, who has spent more than 20 years in Russia without interruption,” Fenoglio said.
He said that reliable reporting from Russia was more important than ever and that France believed that Russian journalists who were refused visas by Paris were in fact working for Russian intelligence.
Diplomats and journalists say that Russia is now a tougher environment for them to work in than at any time since at least the era of Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Josef Stalin in 1953 and ruled the Soviet Union until 1963.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has tightened control over information and the media, forcing the closure of the last significant independent news outlets and designating many journalists and activists as “foreign agents”.
Publishing what is considered to be “fake news” about the Russian army can lead to long prison sentences under wartime censorship laws, and some Westerners have been convicted of spying.
Many Western news organisations have left Moscow and the arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich in 2023 prompted many more journalists to leave. There are now hardly any U.S. reporters left in Russia. Gershkovich was released in a swap last year.
Russian officials say Western media groups give indulgent coverage of Ukraine, biased reporting on the war and excessively negative coverage of Russia. Western news outlets say they try to give balanced coverage.
Russia was ranked 162nd out of 180 countries by Reporters Without Borders in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
