Journalist Arkady Babchenko left Russia

Journalist Arkady Babchenko decided to leave Russia. He is currently located in Prague. He wrote about this on his Facebook page.

“There is an informed, substantiated opinion that for some time it is better for me to live outside our God-protected Motherland,” Babchenko explained his departure.

And although Babchenko does not yet connect his departure with indefinite emigration, he finds it difficult to name the timing of his return. In a conversation with a correspondent for the publication “Takie Dela”, the journalist noted that now he could not talk in more detail about the reasons for his departure.

“It’s not about any personal threats, it was rather a question of my freedom or not freedom,” Babchenko said.

In December 2016, after the Tu-154 plane crash of the Ministry of Defense over the Black Sea, Arkady Babchenko published a post on social networks in which he noted that he felt neither joy nor sympathy in connection with the death of the passengers of the plane, since he was indifferent to the death of the members of the Alexandrov ensemble, “flying Now to Syria to sing and dance in front of the pilots to raise their morale so that they can bomb better.”

After the publication of this text, a campaign against the journalist began in some federal media. A Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist demanded that a criminal case be opened against Babchenko, noting “that his friends would put Babchenko up against the wall,” and State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov called for Babchenko to be deprived of citizenship.