UNDER REGISTRATION

Updated Wednesday, March 20, 2024-22:47

Practicing journalism in territories where freedoms are not respected always carries a risk, and this has been confirmed once again with the expulsion from Russia of EL MUNDO's special envoy in Moscow,

Xavier Colás

.

A retaliation that, without reaching the extremes with which

Vladimir Putin

usually treats his opponents, makes clear a desire to dispense with those who, from their professional independence,

report the abuses of an increasingly despotic regime

.

This is what he has done brilliantly for me

with our reporter for 12 years, until the Russian authorities arbitrarily denied him the renewal of his work visa, giving him 24 hours to leave the country.

The expulsion of Colás, who has just published the book

Putinistan

(The Sphere of Books), in which he denounces the "delusional" authoritarianism of the Russian president, occurs in the context of growing harassment of the press.

Putin crossed a new point of no return this weekend by organizing manifestly fraudulent elections to consolidate his power, just after the more than suspicious death of the democratic opponent.

Alexei Navalny

and the subsequent wave of mass arrests of his supporters.

Immersed in a dictatorial drift with no apparent turning back,

the autocrat crosses one limit after another

.

As Colás remembers in our

Foreground

, has been accompanied by the same cabinet for more than two decades, and his intention is to hold on to power "until the cemetery."

The foreign press is an uncomfortable witness to his despotism.

The retaliation against the ELMUNDO journalist is, therefore, one more step in an accelerated process of democratic decomposition, of which Russian citizens are also victims.

like he said

Andrei Sakharov

, Soviet nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1975, "a country that does not respect the rights of its own citizens will not respect the rights of its neighbors."

It is the sad situation in which Russia continues to be trapped, which Putin has dragged into an illegal and illegitimate war against Ukraine that has now lasted more than two years.

Several foreign journalists, including Colás,

have suffered police visits to their homes

to warn them not to report on protests by Russian military women.

The responsibility of journalism is to create critical and moral awareness where human rights are trampled with impunity, and that is why the Russian regime is inflexible towards those who comply with that obligation.

It is no coincidence that all tyrants persecute - and, deep down, fear - those who have the power to communicate and use it with courage and rigor.

Sakharov, who was also one of the fathers of the H-bomb, put it better than anyone: "I have come to the conclusion that

The most powerful weapon in the world is not the bomb, but the truth

».

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