Moscow insults Finnish journalist for declining invitation to investigate Chechnya's alleged persecution and torture of gay men

Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, has mocked Finnish journalist Erkka Mikkonen for declining an invitation to Chechnya to investigate allegations that local police have been detaining and torturing gay men. “The Finnish journalist has decided against traveling to Chechnya, citing his newsroom’s judgment. I don’t know how this qualifies in Finland, but in Russian it’s called ‘chickening out,’” Zakharova wrote on Facebook.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson also ridiculed a statement by Elina Ravantti, the head of the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s international desk, who argued that any journalist investigating the situation in Chechnya would need open access to different people — an unlikely prospect, if Mikkonen went there on a tour organized by state officials.

“This is really very, very, very funny!” Zakharova wrote, saying that Mikkonen never even planned to visit Chechnya before the Russian government’s formal invitation. Zakharova also said that Mikkonen already appealed to Russia’s supposedly untrustworthy state officials, when he asked her last week to comment on Chechnya in the first place.

Simply put, Western journalists are still busy chasing Pokemons. But I’m confident that someday they’ll return to real, unbiased work, when they finally become disgusted with passing off this stuff as journalism.

More than 100 gay men in Chechnya have reportedly been kept in secret prisons, tortured, and forced to denounce other gay men. Three men have reportedly been killed. Novaya Gazeta, Radio Liberty, Meduza, and The Guardian have independently corroborated a mass crackdown on gay men in Chechnya. Local authorities, however, have denied these accusations, insisting implausibly that there are no gays in Chechnya. Like Maria Zakharova, President Putin has be reluctant to comment publicly on the allegations. Last month, Meduza published the story of one gay man who says he was forced to flee Chechnya. Read it here.