By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Thursday it had refused to renew the accreditation of Le Monde’s correspondent due to France’s refusal to issue a visa to a Russian reporter, leaving the renowned French daily absent from Moscow for the first time since the 1950s.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that after France declined to grant a visa to a journalist from Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, Moscow had refused to extend the journalist accreditation of Le Monde’s Benjamin Quénelle.
Zakharova said that Quénelle, who has covered Russia for two decades, had been the casualty not due to any particular problem with him personally but that Russia had been forced to retaliate against France.
Le Monde, one of France’s most influential newspapers, criticised what it said was the “covert expulsion of our journalist”.
“For the first time since 1957, Le Monde is prevented from having a correspondent based in Moscow,” Jérôme Fenoglio, its director, wrote in an article in the paper.
France’s foreign ministry called on Russia to reverse its decision and said that if it did not do so, there would a response.
Le Monde said that reliable reporting from Russia was more important than ever and France believed that Russian journalists who were refused visas by Paris were in fact working for Russian intelligence.
Diplomats and journalists say that Russia is now a tougher environment for them to work in than at any time since at least the era of Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Josef Stalin in 1953 and ruled the Soviet Union until 1964.
Since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has tightened control over information and the media, forcing the closure of the last significant independent news outlets and designating many journalists and activists as “foreign agents”.
Publishing what is deemed to be “fake news” about the Russian military can lead to long prison sentences under wartime censorship laws, and some Westerners have been convicted of espionage.
Many Western news organisations have left Moscow since 2022 and the arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich in 2023 prompted many more journalists to leave. There are now hardly any U.S. reporters left in Russia. Gershkovich was released in a prisoner swap last year.
Russian officials say Western media groups give indulgent coverage of Ukraine, biased reporting on the war and excessively negative coverage of Russia. Western news outlets say they try to give balanced coverage.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris; editing by Mark Trevelyan and Mark Heinrich)
