Photo: Star Media / Imago Images / Scanpix / LETA
A court in Moscow has sentenced Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen in absentia to eight years in prison for comments they made about alleged Russian military atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Monday.
Gessen was found guilty of “disseminating knowingly false information about Russian military personnel motivated by political hatred” for comments they made about the military occupation of Bucha in a 2023 interview with Russian journalist Yury Dud.
Gessen, who since 2017 has been a staff writer at the New Yorker, was born in Russia but emigrated with her family to the US as a child. Despite living in Russia for 14 years as an adult, Gessen chose to leave the country in 2013 after the Kremlin raised the idea of removing the children of same-sex couples. The journalist, who identifies as nonbinary and transgender, has been a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin and is one of Russia’s most prominent LGBT rights activists.
Bucha, a small town in the Kyiv region, was occupied by Russian troops for 33 days during the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. During that time, over 1,400 people were killed, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among them 175 people who were found in mass graves and torture chambers.
Although the Kremlin has always denied that civilians were killed by the Russian army in Bucha, the evidence of extreme human rights abuses that emerged after the town’s liberation shocked the world and the city has become synonymous with Russian war crimes.
