There have been others, too many others, but this time, it was the husband and daughters of Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor and broadcaster for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the editorially independent, U.S.-funded media organization that reports the news in 27 languages across 23 countries from its headquarters in Prague. They shuttled from television studios to congressional offices to advocacy events, trying to draw attention to the waking nightmare of this 47-year-old veteran journalist and American citizen imprisoned in Russia on trumped-up charges of spreading false information about the Russian military.
The settings could be as surreal as the dilemma. There was Kurmasheva’s 16-year-old daughter, Bibi Butorin, ushered through the heavy barriers swaddling the U.S. Capitol grounds, past the oceans of police and guns, into an eerie, echoing Capitol mostly cleared out for another Bibi — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — in advance of his address to Congress. There was her sister, Miriam, about to turn 13, sitting next to her in a windowless, wood-paneled meeting room with that elegant, old-school red carpeting, listening to the government officials and advocates walk a small group of reporters through the latest numbers on Americans wrongfully detained or held hostage abroad.
Grim words, jargon, acronyms. Torture. Moral hazard. SPEHA (that would be Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, but SPEE-haw to anyone in the know).
Later, over lunch nearby, Bibi tried to explain the unexplainable. Her mother wasn’t even on a reporting trip when she was detained last year in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, where the Volga and Kazanka rivers meet more than 500 miles east of Moscow. Her mother was visiting Bibi’s and Miriam’s elderly grandmother.
“It’s crazy that it’s happening to her,” Bibi said. “It’s not like she was on the front lines.”
Kurmasheva was temporarily detained by Russian authorities June 2, 2023 while waiting for her return flight at the airport in Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan, where she’d gone to see her mother. A dual citizen of Russia and the United States, she was flagged for allegedly not registering her U.S. passport. Both of her passports were confiscated, essentially trapping her in the country.
Her husband, Pavel Butorin — the director of RFERL’s Current Time TV — thought it was a minor paperwork issue that could be easily resolved. Weeks passed before he told his daughters.
And yet it was far from easy.
All through the summer and into the fall they waited. In October, Bibi, at home in Prague, got a text message from a friend. Something like: “I just saw. I’m so sorry.” She had no idea what her friend was talking about.
“I was like, ‘OK, thank you,’” Bibi remembers responding. Then she went to Starbucks to meet another friend, who passed along some news she’d just read: “Did you see an RFE journalist was detained? I think in Russia.”
Bibi knew it had to be her mother. And yet, it was almost impossible to process at the time.
“I didn’t understand what a big deal it was until I saw it on the New York Times,” she said.
Kurmasheva, who had been under house arrest, was now in prison. The Russian court system is inscrutable to say the least, and Pavel Butorin said that, to this day, he’s not precisely sure what charges she faced when she was imprisoned awaiting trial Oct. 18, 2023.
Her husband worried that she’d soon been forgotten. In the corridors of U.S. power, her name wasn’t being mentioned.
“What’s up with that?” he thought. “You can’t pronounce her simple name? It’s four letters. It pissed me off.”
That began to change this April when President Biden mentioned her by name in his remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner while also referencing the better-known case of Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia in March 2023 while on assignment for the newspaper.
“Journalism is clearly not a crime,” Biden told the audience of media executives, reporters, government officials and celebrities. “Putin should release Evan and Alsu immediately.”
For many, it was the first time they’d heard her name.
Her husband said he still relies on news reports, which have suggested that his wife may have been targeted because she was one of the editors of the book, “Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.” He said he’s also certain that Russian authorities would have been familiar with Kurmasheva — an ethnic Tartar who was born in Kazakhstan but grew up in Tatarstan — because she’d been a RFE/RL newscaster before moving into a less-public editor’s role. (Kurmasheva became a U.S. citizen through a program for employees of U.S.-sponsored media abroad. Her daughters are also U.S. citizens. Her husband, who grew up in Russia, is a U.S. citizen, too, but renounced his Russian citizenship long ago.)
Since Kurmasheva’s detention, Pavel Butorin and his daughters have had only limited communication with her. They send postcards, but her responses — made more infrequent and complicated by a miasma of Russian prisoner rules — have been heavily censored.
The family was in Washington for two July weeks of media appearances and meetings with U.S. government officials when they got the news that Kurmasheva had been sentenced to 6½ years in a penal colony for supposedly spreading false information about the Russian military. The sentence had been handed down three days earlier, on July 19, the same day that a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on espionage charges following his arrest last March.
In an interview, Diane Foley — founder of the Foley Foundation, which hosted the Capitol event attended by Kurmasheva’s daughters and husband — said in an interview that journalists are particularly prized by despotic regimes to silence the flow of information.
“Putin doesn’t want people to know the truth,” she said.
The arrests and sentencing of the two journalists have been met with widespread condemnation of the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin by media organizations and the U.S. government. It has also thrust their families into the labyrinth of international diplomacy.
For some, finding a way out of that labyrinth amounts to a quest for an affirmation from the U.S. government that has attained an aura of mystery, something like a holy grail for the families of American’s imprisoned abroad. It’s an official designation that a person has been wrongfully detained, which pushes that person’s case to a part of the State Department — the one represented by that SPEHA acronym that Kurmasheva’s daughters and husband heard about during the Capitol event they attended July 24.
SPEHA has juice. It has broad authority to negotiate prisoner swaps and has access to special resources and diplomatic tools.
Basketball star Brittney Griner — who was freed in a 2022 prisoner swap for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant of Death” — had received the designation after she was arrested outside Moscow for carrying a small of amount of cannabis oil. So too had Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine who had been accused of assaulting a Russian police officer after a night of heavy drinking and was later swapped for a Russian drug smuggler.
Advocates have been critical of the wrongfully detained designation process because it’s so opaque, leaving families puzzled about who gets it and why. Foley — whose freelance reporter son, James, was beheaded in 2014 by extremists after being held captive in Syria — calls the designation something “precious” but incredibly difficult to attain.
Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was quickly designated wrongfully detained. But Kurmasheva has not been — for reasons unknown.
In a different version of her story, she would have been home long ago. Her husband was so confident her passport problem would be quickly resolved that he bought tickets for his family of four to see a Taylor Swift concert next week in Warsaw — on Miriam’s 13th birthday. Now they’ll just be three.
