Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko on Ukraine, Putin and being poisoned

Elena Kostyuchenko worked for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta for 17 years, including reporting from Ukraine on the atrocities committed by Russian forces immediately following the invasion in February 2022. Her work there put a target on her back, prompting her to flee Russia for exile abroad.

FRANCE 24 spoke with Kostyuchenko at United Nations headquarters in New York as she attended a side event on the regional implications of the human rights situation in the Russian Federation on October 24. The event was scheduled the same week that the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Russian Federation, Mariana Katzarova, presented her first report to the Third Committee of the 78th session of the General Assembly. The report sounds the alarm on “a pattern of suppression of civil and political rights” in Russia, including mass arbitrary arrests and the “persistent use of torture and ill-treatment”. 

The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You reported for Novaya Gazeta in Ukraine and then had to flee because you found out you were on the Kremlin’s kill list. What happened?

I came to Ukraine on the first day of the war. I reported from a few cities including Odesa and Mykolaiv and Kherson, which was then under occupation, and after that I was to travel to Mariupol. Mariupol was still resisting back then … There was only one passable road, through Zaporizhzhia. I was preparing to take this road into the city and just a day before I got a call from my colleague from Novaya Gazeta. She told me that her sources told her that pro-Kremlin Chechen leader [Ramzan] Kadyrov said they have an order to find me. They have my information and an order not to arrest me, but to kill me.

That information was confirmed by my source in Ukrainian military intelligence, who also said that people at Russian checkpoints have my photo and my name. My chief editor, Murata, called me and asked me to leave Ukraine as soon as possible. I spent one more day trying to find another way to Mariupol. I failed, so I left Ukraine.

You managed to get out of Ukraine with your life, but you were targeted again once in exile. How did you discover that you had been poisoned?

That is what my doctors are thinking. A police investigation is ongoing, but I don’t have the results yet. I was in Germany because my newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was shut down by Russia, so I joined Meduza – another independent media outlet – and they were about to send me back to Ukraine. I needed a visa, so I went to Munich to apply for one and on my way back I felt unwell.

The first thing I noticed is that I was sweating a lot and the sweat smelled strange, not like sweat but like rotten fruit. And then I got a headache, and later on it was hard for me to understand, hard to orient in space. I couldn’t really understand how to get home from the railway station.

The next day other symptoms followed, like extreme stomach pain and dizziness and nausea, and I vomited. I was thinking that it was Covid-19. And then the doctors – of course, their first guess wasn’t poisoning either – ruled out lots of diagnoses but in two and a half months of testing, they said that poisoning is the most likely explanation, and it’s the only explanation they have. They discovered that my liver enzymes are five to seven times higher than normal. They also found blood in my urine. I’m still dealing with the aftereffects.

What was it about your reporting that made you a target?

I have no idea. Actually, I hope that I will be able to ask this question to the people who tried to do it to me. It’s stupid trying to kill journalists because they are just describing the reality, and if reality is terrible, it’s not our fault. It’s the fault of people who made the reality terrible. And we know who made Russian reality terrible – Vladimir Putin. We are just describing what’s happening and we are obliged to keep our people in touch with reality; that is all we do.

At Novaya Gazeta, if someone was killed then another journalist just went in his or her place. When Anna Politkovskaya – who reported on Chechnya – was killed, then Natalia Estemirova continued her reporting. Then Natalia Estemirova was killed and Elena Milashina kept doing the same thing … It’s the only response we can have to this violence – to keep our people informed, to keep going in our professional lives.

We’re not going to stop. That’s why it’s extremely stupid to kill journalists, and that’s why I am really looking forward to the opportunity of asking these people [about] their motivations.

Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006, was an inspiration to you. What was your relationship with her?

She is the reason I became a journalist. I am from a poor family and I started to work at quite an early age, mostly washing floors. I started to work as a journalist in high school. I needed to earn money because I didn’t have enough money to buy new shoes, but I didn’t take the work seriously. I worked at a local newspaper in my hometown.

And then I bought Novaya Gazeta and I opened it to one of Politkovskaya’s articles about ethnic cleansing – a Chechen village massacre where 36 people were killed by Russian soldiers, and one of them was crucified.

There was a story in the same article about a 9-year-old Chechen boy who forbade his mother to listen to Russian songs on the radio because Russian soldiers took his father from his home and when they brought him back, he was dead and his nose was cut off. I can’t even describe how I felt when I read it. It’s like all my world broke down.

I thought I knew things about my country. I thought I knew what was happening in Chechnya, for example. I knew that Russian soldiers were fighting terrorists and protecting civilians. The word ‘cleansing’ – what is that? I went to the library and I asked them for all the Novaya Gazeta articles.

I started reading Anna Politkovskaya’s articles and then I read others and I got so mad at Novaya Gazeta because they completely ruined my world. I was 14. It’s not a pleasant thing when you don’t have a common truth with the people around you anymore. And then I decided that I would go and work there. So I did.

I joined Novaya as a trainee when I was 17. Anna Politkovskaya was the first person I saw when I entered the building. I didn’t recognise her at that moment because, at that time, Novaya Gazeta was in black and white and they had very small portraits of the authors.

She was extremely beautiful and her office was just next to mine. I always knew that she was there because people were standing in line in front of her office to talk. She always worked. She never chatted – no drinking tea with someone else – she was working there, talking to people, writing things down. In April 2006, they gave me a place on the staff and in October 2006 she was killed.

It was the first murder of one of my colleagues that I lived through and it was the hardest one. I regret every day that I didn’t approach her and that I didn’t thank her for all that she did for me. Even though she didn’t know it, she gave me a profession, she gave me the truth. Somehow I thought I had time. I thought I would become a good journalist and I would approach her, and then I would tell her. But you never know how much time you have, so now I try to thank people right away. 

You went on to work for Novaya Gazeta for many years and now you’ve published your first book, which is a memoir and also a compilation of many of those stories. You have a painful relationship with Russia, don’t you?

This is a book about me loving Russia. It’s a book about this love and how it [changed] during my lifetime and how it changed me, not always in the best way. 

It’s also a book about how Russia descended into fascism and how I failed to notice that because I love my country. This love gave me the strength to write about things that I see and discover things that people try to hide and talk with people who I usually wouldn’t talk with. This love also gave me hope, and this hope made me blind in many ways. It’s not only my personal story. It’s also the personal stories of so many different people.

It consists of reports from Novaya Gazeta, where I was writing for 17 years. There is a story about children living in an hospital for amputees, about a gay couple in a village in the south of Russia, the story of a woman who was looking for her murdered husband’s body in Donbas. There is a story about indigenous people in Russia’s far north, who are basically dying out – there are just 700 of them left. There are so many voices. For me, it’s crucial to share these voices, because I believe to understand these people, their fears, their hopes, dreams, their expectations, and how these expectations are not being met, is as important as understanding Putin.

You have said Vladimir Putin is a symptom, but that he’s not really the root problem in Russia.

We have fascism in Russia and the role of Putin is enormous. The seeds grew deep, and removing Putin right now is not a solution. I mean, it would solve a lot of things. It would end the Ukrainian war, for sure, but would it cure us as a society? No. I believe we need a long time and lots of effort to understand how we became what we became. 

I believe that the root of this lies in the [dissolution of the] Soviet Union, which was a release for so many nations but also a tragedy for so many people – especially in the 1990s, which was a time of poverty and crime and enormous violence. This resentment, this trauma, is taken by Putin and explained by him as, ‘Look it’s what we lost but Russia can be great again. We can restore our greatness and this can be not just a country but a great country.’ And, unfortunately, he implemented this in our country and our culture made fascism possible.

There are so many other factors, and I hope I wrote about some of them. But that’s what led us to the place we are now. It will be a big common work to overcome fascism. It doesn’t happen just like that.

Why do you think more ordinary Russians are not speaking out against the war in Ukraine and about this descent into totalitarianism?

It’s not so easy to speak against the war. Right now, we have two articles in the criminal and administrative code [that define sharing] information that is controversial as a crime, and it’s punishable by up to 15 years in prison. And there are many people who are in prison for basically sharing the news, sharing the information about Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol. There is another article against ‘discrediting the Russian army’ – you don’t even need to share information, [expressing] any negative emotion – like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sad, I hate this war’ – would be enough. 

They have forbidden words like ‘war’, ‘occupation’, ‘annexation’ – occasionally it can be ‘murder’, ‘rape’, ‘fascism’. But people are still resisting and they will continue. I know about 25,000 Russians have been detained since the beginning of the invasion, who are actively protesting against the war. I know a lot of anti-war initiatives like the feminist anti-war movement and some other initiatives, but their work is not so public for obvious reasons, because prison terms in Russia right now are enormous.

The opinion polls that Russian propaganda is using are not showing [the reality] because if you have a punishment for saying, ‘I’m against war’ and if someone approaches you on the street and asks, ‘What do you think about war,’ what can you say? But there are some other sophisticated, sociological methods [of gauging opinion]. These show that about 15 percent of people actively support the war and 15 percent also actively oppose the war and in the middle is the majority of Russians, like 70 percent, who are basically tolerating the war. We don’t know the way out of it. We don’t know a way to resist. They are suffering all the consequences of this war. We don’t want to be in that situation. But they don’t feel that you can do something because helplessness is our national trauma. 

Can you talk about the role that television has played? And how it has become personal when it comes to the relationship with your mother?

The role television is playing – and not just television, but state propaganda – is enormous. It’s what makes this war possible. Our propaganda is sophisticated. It’s talented and it’s extremely well funded. The funds for propaganda right now, it’s like $1.4 billion. It’s quite a lot. And it’s not just television. They have an ‘organisation dialog’ – the only goal is to produce fake [information] about this war and to spread it on social media.

They have troll factories, although [Yevgeny] Prigozhin (the late Wagner chief who founded the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm) is not in the picture anymore. But still. And they have propaganda in the schools. In Russian schools there are lessons which children are obliged to attend [where they are] being taught that this war – well we don’t say ‘war’, it’s a ‘special military operation’, right? – that this ‘special military operation’ is necessary and that Ukraine is not a real country. I believe people who are doing that, who are mutilating the souls of Russian people, they should [face] accountability for that.

It has also personally affected me, like many other Russians; my mom is watching TV, like all people of her generation, and it’s poisoning her. She has a completely different picture of what’s happening.

I’ve been to Ukraine. When I was in Ukraine and I was reporting from Ukraine, she was calling me and explaining to me what I see because she saw it on TV. 

I keep talking to her and she keeps talking to me, because we love each other. And it’s hard, because sometimes she says, ‘I can’t talk about it’ and we don’t talk about it for a day or two … And it’s very hard to listen to each other, to really listen to each other. And sometimes I’m like, ‘Mum, I don’t want to speak with TV. I want to speak with you. Don’t repeat these things.’ It’s really hard, but it’s what we are going to do because we love each other. I definitely don’t want to give up my mom to Putin. He won’t be able to take her from me. 

Recently she said that she doesn’t understand the goal of this war anymore. She says that this war makes no sense but that Russia should win because we started it and there’s only one way out – to win. And I think completely the opposite – the only way that Russia has a future is if Russia loses the war, because if we win this war, God forbid … how many people will be killed while [waiting for] this war [to be] won?

The UN’s just released its first report on the situation of human rights in Russia. Did that report corroborate your own findings?

Very much. And what I really like about this report is that it shows that the degradation of human rights has a long story, that it did not just happen [with the invasion of Ukraine] on February 24, 2022. No, it started long ago, and the repression was increasing, the violations of human rights were increasing slowly. But it seems like the world was ignorant about that for a long time, because everybody wanted to have a normal business partner relationship with Russia, and when I say with Russia, I mean, with Putin. And here we are.

I really appreciate the work that Mariana Katzarova did [as the first UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Russian Federation]. Despite that fact that the Russian state declined to recognise her mandate and declined to let her in the country, she did tremendous work. And I’m very happy that the special mandate was renewed and the next special report will follow. And I believe it’s super important right now for the people outside of Russia to know what’s happening inside of Russia, because it’s not just a matter of our [domestic] human rights. It’s a matter of world security.

Do you still fear for your life? 

I cannot say that I fear for my life. I consider risks … you always know that risks like that exist, and you just learn how to live with them.

What will you do now? You can’t go back to Russia.

Yeah, I cannot. And actually it’s super hard for me because I really want to be in my country, be with my people. And there, things have gotten worse …  I want to be there and I want to make things right as much as I can. 

Can Russians read your book?

Yeah, we had to invent a whole scheme for that. When I wrote the book, I approached some publishing houses and they said that they read it, they liked it a lot, [but] there’s no way we’re going to publish it because it breaks three articles of the criminal code and that means you’re going to prison if you publish it. 

Medusa, where I am working now, established their own publishing house, and they basically used the Soviet model of dispersing forbidden information: samizdat (the clandestine distribution of information banned by the state) and tamizdat (literature smuggled abroad for publication). 

[It is tamizdat in that the] book is published in Russian abroad and for Russian people [who] are able to smuggle the book into Russia.

But we [are also using the model for] samizdat: The book is going to be dispersed in an electronic version, for free, in Medusa’s application, [which] has five ways to avoid blockade by the Russian state … Medusa agreed that they will not oppose people in Russia printing it out and making a book. Samizdat [were] handmade books. It’s so weird that we are using such an old Soviet practice. 

This book would be interesting not just for Russian people [but] also for people who are curious about how everyday life under fascism looks – because right now the world [is taking] an authoritarian turn, so many countries and many cultures are in danger.

What I have learned from the past few years is that no one is immune [to] fascism.

If I could send a message to my past, it would be to stay alarmed – be hysterical if you need to, fight for your country, because you can lose it. And I want my readers to be very alarmed.