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. 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 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 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 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The clampdown on these NGOs has been criticised by Kommersant’s writers.

Now the newspaper has found itself under pressure from two sides: on the one hand it is pressed by the rapidly shrinking press freedoms in Russia, and on the other by restrictions from the West.

The paper’s owner, Alisher Usmanov, has been in the EU’s crosshairs from the start of the war and was added to the sanctions list for being “close to Putin”, a charge he denies. Usmanov bought the paper in 2006, beating major businessman Roman Abramovich, the state company Russian Railways and the government-owned holding Gazprom-Media in the bidding. "I've always been interested in the media business, so I decided to give it a try," was how Usmanov explained his decision at the time. Since then, the newspaper has remained one of the most successful titles in Russia and one of the few that is in profit.

“Sanctions against our shareholder have no direct effect on us, but they do have an indirect effect,” says Zhelonkin. “They make it more difficult to access foreign sources directly for comments or attend international events, or receive subscriptions from partners like Reuters and Bloomberg. Now all these relations are suspended.”

Reporting is also made harder by Russia’s pariah status; Kommersant could not get any of its journalists accredited to the recent Nato summit in Vilnius in July and had to write up that story remotely. “But we still have reporters covering the whole globe,” Zhelonkin says.

The sunset of Russian press freedom

The press flourished in Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s, when the independent television channel NTV was established as the “CNN of the East.” NTV reported freely on the first Chechen war, but pressure on it began to grow soon after Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000 in the midst of the second Chechen conflict.

The first thing Putin did upon taking office was to reclaim control over TV stations such as NTV and evict oligarch Boris Berezovsky from the leading public broadcaster, then called ORT and now known as The First Channel. But for years afterwards the Kremlin largely left the press alone.

Companies like Dutch national Dirk Sauer’s Independent Media flourished, the founder of The Moscow Times that then expanded and produced the Russian version of Cosmopolitan and a raft of lifestyle magazines. Independent Media reached its apogee with the launch of the newspaper Vedomosti in 1999, a joint venture between Independent Media, the Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times that overnight became the paper of record. Oligarch Vladimir Potanin launched the rival Russky Telegraf around the same time, which was also modelled on the leading international financial press.

After ignoring the press for almost two decades, the Kremlin became increasingly aggressive as relations with the West soured. It introduced a 20% cap on foreign ownership of the press in September 2014, five months after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the sanctions era.

A now-former employee of leading Russian business paper RBС – which used to belong to oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov – told this correspondent that in the period after the annexation of Crimea top editors would regularly get calls from the Kremlin complaining about their editorial content.

“On one occasion tensions became so inflamed that we came to work and there was a small demonstration outside the office of what were obviously pensioners who had been paid to come and make a scene,” the employee said at the time. Prokhorov eventually sold RBС in June 2017 and began liquidating many of his other Russian holdings. Some media claimed he was forced to sell the media outlet.

In 2020, the business newspaper Vedomosti was acquired by a new owner with close commercial ties to the state. Senior staff began to complain of editorial interference and employees began leaving in droves, either emigrating or setting up their own independent titles.

However, the situation changed dramatically when opposition politician Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, following months of medical treatment in Germany after he was poisoned with Novichok. When his arrest at the airport caused an international uproar, the Kremlin took the gloves off and “repression-lite”, as analyst Mark Galeotti dubbed it, became naked repression. Scores of publications were labelled as “foreign agents” under a law that was first introduced in 2012 and was used to target NGOs. This law was radically beefed up in 2017, 2019, 2020 and again in 2021, when an amendment was introduced saying that publications in receipt of foreign money could be branded as “foreign agents”. Informal organisations were also added to the designation and driven underground or into exile. Dozens of titles were driven out of business, shuttered or fled abroad, often to Latvia.

Journalism in a time of war

In 2022, the Kremlin adopted new wartime censorship laws that are by far the most repressive interference with the press in the last three decades. Under the current legislation, papers have to refer to the fighting in Ukraine as a “special military operation” (SVO) and are banned from using the word “war”. The legislation also renders any “discreditation” of the Russian armed forces punishable by up to five years in prison, while spreading "unreliable information" about the army and its activities could be punished by up to 15 years. This effectively makes any criticism of the war illegal. Overall, working as a journalist in Putin’s Russia has become extremely difficult.

Bloomberg reported in March last year that as the media law is retroactive, many media responded by removing materials about the invasion from their archives; some, like The Bell, informed their readers that they were dropping coverage of the "military operation" completely.

“Others, like liberal opposition paper Novaya Gazeta led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, and Kommersant are trying to follow the letter of the law, stubbornly avoiding the word 'war,' although their discomfort with it and with the war itself is quite apparent if you read between the lines,” Bloomberg reported.

Zhelonkin claims that he follows the same journalistic ethics as before the war, but the series of new media laws pose a significant challenge.

Still, the word “war” frequently appears in Kommersant’s texts. This primarily has to do with its use in interviews with celebrities, politicians and public figures, who are always quoted verbatim, Zhelonkin says. This includes interviews with so-called “foreign agents” whom the paper is required by law to identify as such.

Kommersant continues to provide its readers with objective information about the war and presents a variety of views, Zhelonkin added. For example, in May 2023 alone, the newspaper published 150 articles presenting the Ukrainian point of view on the conflict. Nearly half of these cited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and representatives of Ukrainian government bodies as the main source.

“There is no censorship on our pages. It’s not a question of pushing the boundaries outwards, but of preventing them from shrinking inwards. But we can’t violate the law. Beyond that, we don't practise self-censorship – the same as in other countries,” says Zhelonkin.

At a July 2023 press conference with the Russian president following the Russia-Africa summit, Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov was the only journalist to pose a direct question to Putin about the recent arrests of individuals who had spoken out about the war. “People are being arrested for words spoken or written. Is that normal? Thank God, we're not in the year 1937…or maybe, as some people think, it is 1937?” Kolesnikov asked, referring to the year that marked the height of Stalin’s Terror, when hundreds of thousands of people were arbitrarily executed or imprisoned for being domestic “saboteurs.”

"We are in 2023, and the Russian Federation is in a state of armed conflict with a neighbour. I think there should be a certain attitude towards those people who cause us damage inside the country,” Putin responded.

Between a rock and a hard place

As Russian media has sought to not fall foul of the Kremlin’s legislation, a number of outlets and companies have garnered criticism from the West for appearing to cater to the Kremlin’s censorship.

Russian internet giant Yandex was accused of “promoting Kremlin propaganda” after it was found that the top headlines in its news search, Yandex.News, featured only state-approved media. The EU sanctioned the company’s founder, and Yandex has since sold off its news aggregator. The problem was the news aggregator was only linking to media officially registered in Russia – it is illegal to pull up anything other than Russian sources. As time went on, there were fewer and fewer such sources registered in the country. In the end, it turned out that the selection did indeed include mostly the official state-owned media, most of which are rabidly supportive of the war in Ukraine. Effectively Yandex.News was not favouring these sources out of any sense of duty; it was precluded from linking to almost anything else.

Kommersant was also accused of doing the Kremlin’s bidding in 2011, when it terminated its contract with the editor-in-chief of Kommersant Vlast (Kommersant Power, the political division of Kommersant) Maxim Kovalsky after the magazine printed an article with a photo of a tainted voting ballot on which a swear word against the Russian president, deemed offensive, was written. The photo caption read: “A correctly filled-out ballot that has been invalidated.” This caption, according to Kommersant’s management team, misled the reader and was an important reason for Kovalsky's dismissal.

“At that time, I was not yet working at the publishing house, but I’m familiar with the story,” Zhelonkin says. “As far as I know, the contract with Kovalsky was terminated by Kommersant’s CEO and editor-in-chief, not because of criticising the authorities or due to Kremlin pressure, but simply over a violation of the publishing house’s professional standards and ethics. Firing employees in these kinds of cases is actually a global common practice.”

Kovalsky ultimately left the newspaper on the terms of a mutual agreement, but later returned and continued to work at Kommersant until his death from cancer in 2019. The article that caused the stir is still available online, but without the photo.

Around the same time, during the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, a number of independent news websites experienced outages on election day, including Kommersant. The OSCE’s election monitoring mission noted this incident in a report, writing that "Kommersant provided a wider variety of views, while devoting most of its predominantly neutral and negative coverage to the current administration and ER” [Putin’s political party, United Russia – bne IntelliNews].

The discrepancy between the EU’s recent statements about Kommersant and the other positive assessments of its work underscores the contradictory nature of some of the sanctions, which were arguably imposed on the basis of little more than hearsay or unconfirmed media reports. However, a tacit confirmation that no one seriously considers Kommersant to be "pro-Kremlin" is the fact that, unlike a number of blatantly propagandistic Russian media outlets, the newspaper itself is still not on either US or EU sanctions lists.

The most authoritative attempt to lay out the web of connections between big Russian businessmen and the Kremlin was Catherine Belton’s book Putin People, but half a dozen oligarchs sued the publisher HarperCollins, including Usmanov (who didn’t go to court, but got the publisher to retract the most salacious accusations). A number of passages had to be rewritten or cut as the courts ruled that some of the accusations were unfounded. As bne IntelliNews reported, dozens of English-language newspapers have also found themselves in the same position after being sued by oligarchs whom they accused of being “close to Putin” and lost their cases in British libel courts.

Calls and the law

Russia’s leading newspapers have not been afraid to occasionally take on the Kremlin and openly criticise the state. After the well-known investigative reporter Ivan Golunov was arrested on trumped up drug charges in June 2019, Russia’s three leading newspapers – Vedomosti, RBC and Kommersant – took the provocative decision to run identical front pages saying “I/We are Ivan Golunov” to protest against the arrest and show solidarity. The charges were dropped. Golunov was released and the arresting officers were investigated.

Being a journalist in Russia has always been a dangerous job, but in the last two years since the repression went up a gear those dangers have escalated dramatically.

Ivan Safronov was a highly respected Kommersant defence reporter who in 2020, after moving on to become an advisor to the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, was arrested and charged with espionage for reporting on what he claims had been public information. Last September, he was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security prison. Within days of his sentencing, the Kommersant editorial team took the bold action to post a letter of protest in support of their former colleague, themselves risking the opprobrium of the Kremlin.

This July, Novaya Gazeta investigative reporter and human rights defender Elena Milashina was attacked on her way to a Chechen court hearing. Images of her in the wake of a brutal beating, with her head shaved and covered in antiseptic green dye, caused widespread outrage.

In the three decades this correspondent has been covering Russia, foreign correspondents have largely been left alone to do their job. But in March 2023, Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges and has already spent more than 100 days in jail awaiting the start of his trial that could see him given a life sentence. US President Joe Biden said in the middle of July that the White House is actively working on a prisoner swap deal. Prior to Gershkovich’s arrest, the only high-profile incident involving a foreign correspondent was the murder of American correspondent Paul Klebnikov in July 2004 that was widely seen as linked to a book he wrote, The Godfather of the Kremlin, about the 1990s oligarch Berezovsky, a former owner of Kommersant.

How are Russian journalists able to work in such a toxic environment? The knee-jerk assumption is that the Kremlin micromanages the media. While it has full control over the TV stations where the bulk of the population get their information, Russia’s private newspapers continue to have a great deal of freedom and many, but not all, try to report the story straight, though this can still get them into deep trouble.

Russian journalists interviewed for this article from a variety of top outlets, who remain nameless due to the sensitive nature of the topic, told bne IntelliNews that it is very rare for an article to be retracted or heavily amended once it was released – and if then only because there was some factual error, not for political reasons. If the Kremlin has an issue with an article, the journalist, not the article, is targeted.

“Yes, it is scary, as you can spend life in jail, but we don't self-censor,” says a senior editor at one of Russia’s top business papers. “The problems are specifically for those writing about the war, and it’s related to politics. Reporting on the war or saying it is bad is not the main thing. The main problem is the laws are so vague, you never know what is going to happen. You don’t know what constitutes a state secret or when you are revealing ‘counter-sanctions information’ until after you have published a story.”

Even when the vague laws do not lead to the prosecution of a journalist, there are other ways of putting pressure on them. For example, after Kommersant special correspondent Elena Chernenko organised and signed an open letter opposing the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, she was expelled from the Russian Foreign Ministry’s pool of journalists and barred from attending Ministry events. She continues to write for Kommersant to this day.

Zhelonkin says the paper’s editorial decisions are based on the same principles of free speech, objectivity and the duties of the “fourth estate”, where the press’ role is to provide citizens with the information and ideas they need to exercise their democratic power. However, he admits the situation in Russia is more complicated than in the West. “We do take calls, including political calls. I get them from time to time. But we almost never change anything, and when we do, it is to clarify a position,” he says.

According to Zhelonkin, the Kremlin is not micromanaging the press. More often, it's a politician or other public figure complaining they have been misrepresented. In these cases, Zhelonkin says he listens to the complaints and occasionally, if they are justified, may make some small changes. “But these are opinions or clarifications. Otherwise we stick to the fourth estate values, or at least we try to,” says Zhelonkin.

Another senior editor of a top business paper adds that for those not working on the war, the biggest change has been the reduction in the amount of official information released into the public realm, although many of the main metrics are still being published.

For example, on July 12 the Russian central bank released its current account results, which showed Russia’s trade balance has gone negative to the tune of $1.4bn – news that was welcomed by Ukraine’s supporters as evidence that sanctions are working.

The currency account embarrassment came on the back of January’s news about the budget deficit, which hit the full-year target after the first ten days of March after the Russian finance ministry reported a whopping RUB1.7 trillion hole in the state’s balance sheet.

Russia’s business press reported on these embarrassing results without problem.

“Anything that is officially released by the authorities – the central bank, the ministry of finance or economy – are fine to report. They are in the public realm and so are fair game,” the editor said.

Flying below the radar

While Russia’s state-dominated TV programmes constantly run pro-regime propaganda talk shows and the news reporting is biased to match the Kremlin’s agenda, reporting by the broader press remains much more objective. The difference is that TV reporting reaches tens of millions of viewers, whereas newspapers cater collectively to a few percent of Russia’s population. The Kremlin feels confident in largely ignoring the press reporting.

Still, Zhelonkin is walking a thin red line. With the denuding of Vedomosti, which was one of the most authoritative Russian newspapers until its ownership change in 2020, Kommersant today has arguably remained in pole position in Russia’s newspaper landscape.

The paper’s cautious and balanced approach to old school journalism has earned it respect. When the new US Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy was appointed in April this year, the first and only interview she gave to the Russian press was to Kommersant. In the interview, Tracy presented an unvarnished US view on hot-button issues in current relations between the two countries. The text caught a lot of flak from Russian government officials, while Russia’s Foreign Ministry published a lengthy and emotional response on its website.

Since the war started, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has given one single interview to the Russian press in March last year. The press pool that talked to him included Kommersant’s special correspondent Vladimir Solovyov (not connected to the Russian propagandist from state TV The First Channel of the same name). The interview was highly controversial with Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor, which demanded that the interview not be published in Russia. Roskomnadzor and the Prosecutor General's Office announced their intention to investigate the outlets that participated in the interview, but nothing happened in the end. Although the interview was not published in Kommersant, the newspaper and Usmanov personally were criticised by pro-Kremlin journalists like Sergey Mardan of Komsomolskaya Pravda, who called for shutting down the paper.

“I rarely talk to the shareholder”

Today Kommersant remains under Usmanov’s ownership, but its editor says the Uzbek-born oligarch has little contact with the editorial team and spends most of his time in Tashkent.

“I rarely talk to the shareholder,” says Zhelonkin. “Maybe two or three times a year. I had a long conversation with Usmanov after taking this job [in 2013 – bne IntelliNews], where he explained that he wanted to see a high-quality paper that reflects a broad spectrum of opinions. But I have never had the impression that he tries to interfere with the editorial policy. I would have to talk to him a lot more often than a few times a year for him to have any sort of influence over the editorial content.”

At the end of the day, answering the final question about the classic dispute between opinion journalism and fact-based journalism, Zhelonkin clearly sides with the latter: “Journalists must not be at either end of the spectrum. We must be unbiased and leave the readers to choose their own ideas and options. We represent all the actors and the opinions of public figures and other players. The reader must make up his or her own mind.”