Andrei Babitsky

Andrei Babitsky (Russian: Андрей Маратович Бабицкий, born September 26, 1964 in Moscow) is a Russian journalist and war reporter, who worked for Radio Liberty from 1989 to 2014, covering the 1991 August Coup, Civil War in Tajikistan and, most notably, both the First and Second Chechen Wars from behind Chechen lines. Babitsky is most famous for his kidnapping by the Russian forces in January–February 2000 during the Second Chechen War and his 2005 video interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

His reporting was somewhat controversial in Russia, as he was often accused of siding with the Chechen rebels. Babitsky once said:

One must say that the Chechens cut throats of soldiers not because they are sadists inclined to treat them with brutality, but in order to make the war more convex, visible, vivid, to reach the public and to explain that a war is actually going on, scary and cruel.

However, according to Mario Corti, head of Radio Liberty's Russian service, Babitsky has not shied away from reporting Chechen atrocities and was the first Russian journalist to put the blame for the death of the American disaster relief specialist Fred Cuny on a Chechen warlord.

At the outset of the Russian assault on the Chechen capital Grozny in January 2000 the Russian government announced that there were no civilians left in the city. Babitsky then managed to get into the besieged Grozny and reported under heavy bombing that this was not the case and that civilians did remain in the city. After his last phone contact on January 15, he disappeared. The Russian officials at first denied that they knew anything about his whereabouts. However, it was leaked to Alexander Yevtushenko, friend of Babitsky and war reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda, that on January 16 Babitsky had been detained while trying to leave Grozny and since then had been held in the Chernokozovo prison camp by the Russian forces. On January 28, the authorities admitted to having him in custody since January 23. As Babitsky's family, friends and colleagues voiced fears for his life and the scandal unfolded, after a personal inquiry by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was visiting Moscow, Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov on February 2 pledged to bring Babitsky to Moscow and release him. However, instead of his release, on February 4 the Kremlin spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky announced that on February 3 Babitsky had been handed over to Chechen warlords in exchange for several Russian soldiers held captive by them. "From now on, all federal authorities bear no responsibility for the reporter's fate", Yastrzhembsky added. Chechen rebel authorities, including president Aslan Maskhadov, denied ever having been involved in any such swap. The situation was perceived as one of the first signs of the shrinking tolerance for a free press in Russia under Vladimir Putin, who became acting President of Russia on New Year's Eve. As author Masha Gessen put it, with the story of the prisoner swap, "...Russian troops had treated a journalist--a Russian journalist--as an enemy combatant."

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