Russia to Expel BBC Reporter Amid Simmering Tensions

(Bloomberg) -- Russia has given a British Broadcasting Co. journalist until the end of the month to leave the country in what it said was a retaliatory move for the U.K. discriminating against Russian media and its refusal to issue visas to the country’s reporters.

The reporter will have to leave when their current visa expires on Aug. 31, a Foreign Ministry official said Friday. State-run Rossiya-24 reported late Thursday that BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford’s visa was not renewed, citing unidentified people familiar.

BBC Director-General Tim Davie condemned the expulsion in a statement posted on Twitter, saying it was “a direct assault on media freedom.”

The BBC “did not pay attention to repeated warnings from the Foreign Ministry that appropriate measures would be taken in response to London’s repeated abuse of the visa process for a Russian correspondent,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Telegram post.

In 2019, state-run Tass news service reported that the U.K. didn’t issue visas to several Russian journalists, citing an unidentified person in Moscow. Russia’s Ambassador in London, Andrei Kelin, said at the time Moscow was considering tit-for-tat measures in response, according to Tass.

The move comes as Russia’s relations with the West are near a post-Cold War low and amid the harshest Kremlin crackdown on domestic opposition in years. The government has forced multiple independent news outlets to shutter or identify as “foreign agents,” and opened criminal cases against opposition politicians.

The ministry’s action is the first time that Russia has expelled a British journalist since the Guardian’s Luke Harding was thrown out in 2011. U.S. journalist David Satter was barred from Russia in 2014, while a Polish correspondent for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily was ordered to leave in 2015.

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Rainsford has reported for the BBC from Russia, Turkey, Spain and Cuba, and is author of Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba.

A question she posed to Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko about new British sanctions on his regime created one of the highlights at an eight-hour press conference the authoritarian ruler gave this week.

“You can choke on those sanctions in Great Britain,” Lukashenko told her.

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