BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford reveals devastation at Russia expulsion

BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford reveals her ‘devastation’ at being expelled from Russia and told she can never return in move of retaliation by Kremlin

• The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford will have to leave Russia before the end of September
• It was retaliation for Britain refusing to grant or extend Russian journalist’s visas
• Russia said it was a ‘symbolic deportation’ and a ‘symmetrical reaction’ to the UK 

BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford revealed her ‘devastation’ at being expelled from Russia and told she can never return in move of retaliation by Kremlin.    

Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford was told by the Russian authorities that her visa would not be renewed and that she must leave before it expires at the end of the month.

‘I am being expelled and I have been told that I can’t come back – ever,’ she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Russia has expelled senior BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford in retaliation for Britain ‘discriminating’ against the Russian press

Ms Rainsford, who first went to the country as a student in the 1990s, said she had spent almost a third of her life living there.

She said: ‘To be honest, it’s devastating personally but it is also shocking.

‘Russia has never been a posting for me, it is not just any old place, it is a country that I have devoted a huge amount of my life to trying to understand.’

The BBC has denounced the decision by the Russian authorities not to extend her visa as ‘a direct assault on media freedom’.

Officially the Russians have linked the decision to difficulties Russian journalists have had in obtaining or extending visas from the UK.

Moscow has refused to renew a visa for Rainsford, state TV reported, in an effective expulsion amid simmering tensions with the UK

Ms Rainsford said she had also been told that it was connected to sanctions imposed by the UK on Russian nationals for corruption and for human rights violations in Chechnya.

However, she said she believed that it was another sign of the way the country was increasingly turning in on itself.

‘There were clear signs for Russian media, there have been really serious problems in recent days and weeks for Russian independent journalists,’ she said.

‘But until now, for the foreign press, we’d kind of been excluded from that, somehow shielded from all of that, but this is I think a clear sign that things have changed.

‘It is another really bad sign about the state of affairs in Russia and another downward turn in the relationship between Russia and the world and a sign that Russia is increasingly closing in on itself.’

She said it appeared that the Russians preferred not to allow foreign journalists, like her, who could speak the language and communicate directly with people in the country.

‘It is much easier to have fewer people here who understand and can talk directly to people and hear directly people’s stories and to relate them,’ she said.

‘It is much easier to have people who perhaps don’t speak the language, don’t know the country so deeply.

Rainsford, a Russian-speaker, is an experienced BBC foreign correspondent who has also done stints in Havana, Istanbul and Madrid

‘I just think it is indicative of a really increasingly difficult and repressive environment.’

It is an unusual move that signals a further deterioration in already poor ties between London and Moscow.

It follows a crackdown before parliamentary elections in September on Russian-language media at home whom the authorities judge to be backed by malign foreign interests intent on stoking unrest.

State TV blamed Britain’s treatment of state-backed Russian broadcaster RT and of online state news outlet Sputnik, saying neither could get accredited in Britain to cover international events, for the expulsion. 

‘Sarah Rainsford is going home. According to our experts, this correspondent of the Moscow’s BBC bureau will not have her visa extended because Britain, in the media sphere, has crossed all our red lines,’ Rossiya-24 said.

‘The expulsion of Sarah Rainsford is our symmetrical response,’ it said.

Rainsford, a Russian-speaker, is an experienced BBC foreign correspondent who has also done stints in Havana, Istanbul and Madrid. 

Russia’s relations with the West have sunk to the lowest levels since the Cold War, following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, accusations of Russian interference with elections, hacking attacks and other tensions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described an incident involving a Royal Navy ship in the Black Sea earlier this year was a provocation, and Moscow warned that the military could fire to hit intruding warships if they do not heed warnings

Relations between Russia and Britain have remained particularly strained after the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK.

It was an attack with a Soviet-designed nerve agent that British authorities said had almost certainly approved been ‘at a senior level of the Russian state’ — an allegation Moscow denies.

In a June incident that further aggravated ties, Russia said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of the British destroyer HMS Defender to chase it away from an area near Crimea that Moscow claims as its territorial waters.

The UK, which like most other nations did not recognise Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, insisted the Royal Navy ship was not fired upon and said it was sailing in Ukrainian waters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as a provocation, and Moscow warned that the military could fire to hit intruding warships if they do not heed warnings.

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