This is the first in a three-part series on women who have been wrongly imprisoned.
The very first report I wrote for HUMINT was about the imprisonment of Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist whose story was not receiving enough media attention. She had gone to Russia to help her ailing mother. The Russians took her passport and ramped up their allegations against her, from a $100 fine for failing to report her U.S. citizenship to being a “foreign agent” to purportedly spreading false information.
Last summer, after 14 long months of captivity, Alsu was freed as part of a 24-person, multi-country prisoner swap. “I finally feel safe,” she wrote me in a brief text message. I chronicled her first solitary walk as a free woman — a simple act made significant with her newfound liberty — while documenting how freed captives find their way back into daily life.
For Alsu, that meant going back to work at her media outlet, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). After her ordeal in Russia, she became RFE’s press freedom advocate.
But in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would reduce the U.S. Agency for Global Media — a decision fraught with implications. The agency, citing infiltration by “spies and terrorist sympathizers,” failed to provide any further details in response to my emailed request. And it severed the Congressionally-approved funds that sustain RFE/RL, a cornerstone of independent journalism. Some 1,700 journalists, who are committed to bringing the truth in countries where press freedom is under siege, find themselves facing a new, uncertain future.
In this live conversation, Alsu and I discussed her time in Russia’s prisons, the historic release, and how defunding RFE hurts U.S. national security — all while four RFE journalists sit behind bars, as Alsu did.
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