‘Baseless and Absurd’: New Yorker Editor David Remnick Responds to Russia’s ‘Criminal Case’ Against Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen. Jan Woitas/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.

New Yorker editor David Remnick decried Russia’s criminal case against famed journalist Masha Gessen, calling it “baseless and absurd” in a statement to Mediaite.

Russia charged Gessen, a Russian-American staff writer at the New Yorker, with spreading “knowingly false information,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The latest effort by the Kremlin to target the press amid its brutal invasion of Ukraine focused on comments made by Gessen in an interview with a Russian journalist Yury Dud about “atrocities committed by the Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian city of Bucha,” the Post reported.

Remnick said in a statement: “These charges are baseless and absurd, and The New Yorker stands with Masha Gessen.”

Russian soldiers massacred dozens of civilians in Bucha, a city near Kyiv, at the start of the war in the spring of 2022. The slaughter has stood out as a particularly grisly episode in an invasion infamous for its brutality.

Gessen, according to the Post, said in an interview with Dud that Russian denials about the massacre in Bucha were not true. “The possibility of that is zero,” Gessen said of Russian claims its military killed no civilians.

Those comments from Gessen form the basis of Russia’s case. The Post obtained the charge against Gessen which reads: “According to the information from the Russian General Staff, the information about the mass murder of civilians by the service-members, accompanied by cases of looting, kidnappings and torture in March of 2022 in the town of Bucha during the special military operation is not true.”

Read the full Post report here.