‘I have always acted within the law’
Meduza
04/16/2025
On Tuesday, a Moscow court sentenced journalists Antonina Favorskaya, Sergey Karelin, Konstantin Gabov, and Artem Kriger to 5.5 years in prison on charges of participating in an “extremist organization.” The case stems from the defendants’ alleged participation in creating content for the YouTube channels of the late opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). All of them have denied collaborating with the organization. The details of the charges remain unknown, as the hearings were held behind closed doors. Here’s what you need to know about these four journalists who are headed to prison for their work.
Antonina Favorskaya
As a journalist, Favorskaya covered the trials of Yashin as well as his fellow political prisoners Vladimir Kara-Murza, Oleg Orlov, Zhenya Berkovich, and Svetlana Petriychuk. She attended almost every hearing in Alexey Navalny’s lawsuits over his prison treatment in the Vladimir region. A month before the politician’s death, the journalist traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug to report on the prison where Navalny was held and the surrounding village of Kharp. She filmed the last known video of Navalny alive on February 15, 2024.
On March 18, 2024, a Moscow court sentenced Favorskaya to 10 days in detention for failing to comply with police demands. On the evening of March 27, she was arrested again as she was leaving the detention center. The authorities searched both her home and her parents’ home, after which she was taken for a nighttime interrogation at the Investigative Committee building. The next day, she was charged with involvement in an extremist organization for alleged “gathering materials and producing and editing videos and publications” for the FBK.
Konstantin Gabov
In his closing statement on trial, Gabov said that he was being prosecuted for his professional activities. He had produced reports about activists’ trials as well as the closures of Memorial Human Rights Center, the Sakharov Center, and the Moscow Helsinki Group. According to him, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers had “conducted inquiries” into his work, “from a local TV channel in Syktyvkar to the largest global media outlets like Reuters.” He also noted that his work for the RFE/RL projects Current Time and Radio Svoboda became part of the case against him.
“All the accusation against me are groundless and unproven. I have always acted within the law and in accordance with the Constitution, defending everyone’s right to freedom of thought and expression. My work has been to give a voice to those who cannot be heard and to cover important events that affect society’s life. I believe that journalism is not a crime but an essential part of the democratic process,” Gabov said in his closing statement.
Sergey Karelin
42-year-old cameraman Sergey Karelin was arrested on April 26, 2024, in Russia’s Murmansk region and later transferred to Moscow. He had worked as a freelancer with a range of media outlets, including the Associated Press and Deutsche Welle. Like his co-defendants, he was charged with filming videos for the FBK.
Karelin began working in TV in 2004, spending his first eight years as a sound engineer at NTV before becoming a cameraman for the TV channel 360. Before his arrest, Karelin had worked since 2017 as a cameraman accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry, collaborating with international news agencies and media. He said that after the full-scale war began, he had to take on whatever work he could find, but that it remained important to him to “preserve [his] dignity as a journalist, respect for the people in the stories and the storytelling itself, and to uphold journalistic ethics.” Around that time, he was offered a job filming street interviews for Popular Politics, a YouTube channel founded by Navalny’s associates. Karelin consulted a lawyer, and they concluded that there was nothing illegal about his working with the channel.
In his final statement to the court, Karelin said he was being imprisoned “for my professional work, for an honest and impartial approach to journalism, and for love — for my family and my country.”
“You have to understand that if the court finds me guilty, my whole family will be punished with me — my grandfather, who, as I’ve said, is 101 years old and a veteran of the Battles of Rzhev; my elderly parents, who are doing their best to stay strong, and above all, my wonderful daughter. I never imagined my child would also become a victim of political repression — just like the children of those persecuted in the 1930s. Can you imagine something like that happening to your own children? And yes, of course, I’m just another “Dad away on a business trip,” like so many others back then — and now. I don’t know when I’ll see her again, let alone hold her…”
Artem Kriger
A journalist with Sotavision, Artem Kriger covered court hearings and protests in Moscow. The 24-year-old is the nephew of activist Mikhail Kriger, who was part of Russia’s movement back in the 1990s and began supporting political prisoners around the same time. In May 2023, Mikhail Kriger was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of “justifying terrorism” and “inciting hatred” with threats of violence.
On June 18, 2024, Artem Kriger’s home was raided by law enforcement. That same day, a court ordered him into pretrial detention. Investigators claim he has ties to the FBK, but Kriger himself says that he’s effectively being prosecuted for filming man-on-the-street interviews.
“No one will ever convince me to believe in the madness that the prison, investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial systems are trying to impose on me — that I’m some sort of extremist or criminal, that I belong behind bars because I broke the law. I will never believe that, not until my final breath or heartbeat. I will keep telling the truth about what happened to me on June 18, 2024, the day I was detained, until the day I’m free. Let history be the judge and put the dots over all the i’s,” Kriger said in his final statement to the court.
