Beatings, kicks, broken fingers, green paint: the attack on the journalist Yelena Milashina and the lawyer Alexander Nemov has shaken a Russia that is otherwise used to violence.
The fact that journalists are in mortal danger when they do their work in Russia is nothing new. But the attack on Yelena Milashina and the lawyer Alexander Nemov in Chechnya had a new quality. Milashina, investigative journalist for the Russian newspaper Exile Novaya Gazeta, and Nemov were stopped by three cars with masked gunmen on their way from Grozny airport to the city on Tuesday. “It was classic kidnapping,” Milashina later told a Chechen human rights official. The attackers first tied the two in the car, then threw them onto the street and kicked them in the face and body, stabbing Nemov in the leg. They then dragged them to a ravine where they beat them with plastic tubes and demanded that they unlock their phones.