Russia expels two German journalists in tit-for-tat retaliation, ministry says

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it has revoked the accreditation of two employees with the German ARD broadcaster and ordered them to leave the country in what it described as a retaliation to German authorities’ move targeting two journalists from Russia’s state TV.

Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the ministry, told a briefing in Moscow that it may issue accreditation to other ARD employees if German authorities allow journalists from Russia’s Channel One to work in Berlin.

German foreign ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner denied the federal government had shut Channel One’s office, as the Russian broadcaster has claimed.

“The federal government has not closed the office of this broadcaster,” Wagner told a news conference. “Russian journalists can report freely and unhindered in Germany.”

“I can only surmise that this has to do with questions of residence status,” said Wagner, adding that such issues are not dealt with by German federal authorities and state authorities make their decisions independently.

Berlin’s state immigration office said that on Nov. 22 it refused residence permits for the head of Channel One’s bureau and for a cameraman with the channel. It said the decision could be appealed.

Channel One has been under European Union sanctions since December 2022 as tensions soared between Moscow and the West over Russia’s military action in Ukraine. The EU sanctions prevent the channel from broadcasting in Europe but do not affect the presence of staff who work for it in Berlin.

The move followed decisions to refuse German residency for a Brazilian citizen working for Ruptly, a Russian state-owned video news agency, and for the head of the Rossiya Segodnya news agency’s local office and his wife.

Germany’s Foreign Ministry denounced the expulsion of the ARD employees as “unacceptable” and the reasoning for it “wrong,” saying on social platform X that local authorities had made decisions on residence status that could be appealed, and “that is the difference between a legal process and Russian arbitrariness.”

WDR, the regional ARD branch that is responsible for the public broadcaster’s reporting from Russia, confirmed that correspondent Frank Aischmann and a technical employee had their accreditation revoked.

“This is a drastic step,” WDR program director Jörg Schönenborn said in a statement. “With this, our ability to report from Moscow is again being limited. For nearly three years, we have been dealing with intimidation and restrictions to our reporting from Moscow.”

The Associated Press