She went home to care for her mother and ended up in a Russian prison cell

Alsu Kurmasheva, a US-Russian journalist, was arrested last year for failing to register as a 'foreign agent', attended a hearing on the extention of her pre-trial detention, at the Sovetski court in Kazan. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

In the video, which Butorin posted on X, Kurmasheva describes a cell so small that she cannot even take two steps. The toilet is a hole in the floor. There is no hot water. She looks gaunt and thin.Sydney Sweeney’s rise: Hollywood finally has an old-school movie star on its hands, and it has no idea what to do

Instead, Kurmasheva, age 47, endured a Kafkaesque series of setbacks. Officials delayed returning her travel documents and on October 18th, Russia accused her of failing to register as a “foreign agent”, an offence that can carry a five-year prison sentence. On December 11th, they charged her with spreading false information about the Russian military, which could mean a further ten years in prison. Her pretrial detention has been extended until June 5th.

Twenty-three countries, including Ireland, have jointly nominated Kurmasheva for Unesco’s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, which will be conferred on May 3rd, World Press Freedom Day. Her work is said to exemplify a phrase from Unesco’s constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

Washington faces the moral dilemma of creating a precedent and driving up the price of freedom by negotiating for the release of US citizens, or leaving them to rot in prison. Until 2022, negotiations were almost always kept secret. That changed when Washington announced that it had traded the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for basketball player Brittney Griner.

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