Moscow, Aug 27. (dpa/GNA) – Moscow has issued an arrest warrant for a journalist from the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Russian agency reports said on Wednesday.
A Moscow court issued the warrant for the correspondent, according to state news agency TASS, accusing him of “incitement to hatred or hostility.”
The reporter had been placed on the Russian Interior Ministry’s wanted list last week. There was initially no entry for the FAZ’s Balkans correspondent on Interpol, the international association of police authorities.
It remains unclear whether Serbia, one of the journalist’s working regions and a country previously regarded as pro-Russian, would comply with Moscow’s warrant request.
The trigger for the Russian authorities’ action was a question the FAZ journalist, put to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, just over two weeks ago during Zelensky’s visit to the Serbian capital Belgrade. He asked Zelensky, “Can you tell us, Europeans, what we can concretely do to help you kill more Russians, more Russian soldiers, of course.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, described this as a call to kill Russians, saying it was “impermissible” and “criminal.”
The FAZ subsequently said the question had been worded in a misleading way. “We have clarified this and regret the wording,” the statement said.
Under Russian law, the FAZ journalist faces up to six years in prison.
Russia has been waging war with neighbouring Ukraine since February 2022, and Kiev has been given massive military and financial support by Western countries.
GNA