Revolutionary Guards Detain Russian Journalist in Tehran

Last week, while in the Iranian city of Kashan, Russian journalist Yulia Yuzik posted on Instagram: “I might never leave." Little did she know the ominous turn that her trip to Iran was going to take. 

On the evening of Thursday, October 3, forces of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards (or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) stormed Yuzik’s hotel room in Tehran and arrested her. She has now been added to the long list of foreign citizens in Iranian prisons — but a first from Russia, which has close ties to the Islamic Republic. To make things worse, Yuzik faces the charge of collaborating with Israel. 

Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed the arrest shortly after, and said that she would be released after “some explanations.” But that statement, from foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi, was quickly refuted. The Russian embassy in Tehran said the release was “not confirmed.”

Moscow quickly summoned  Mehdi Sanaee, the Iranian ambassador and a man who has done much to cement the Tehran-Moscow partnership. Sanaee spoke to Russia's deputy foreign minister and explained the arrest. 

The International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists both quickly called on Tehran to release Yuzik. 

According to the official account given by the Russian embassy in Tehran, which was confirmed by two of Yuzik’s friends IranWire has been in contact with, Yuzik had arrived in Iran on September 29 in a personal, not professional, capacity. After her arrest, she was allowed to make a short call to her mother, whom she told she had been accused of collaborating with Israel. 

“Anyone who knows Yulia knows that this is a truly ridiculous accusation,” a friend of Yuzik’s from Moscow told IranWire, asking to remain anonymous. “She has always been an independent journalist and has fought any power to show the truth. She is not the type to collaborate with any government. This was an entirely private trip and she was not even doing any journalism. She went because she loved Iran so much and was to take some trips with her journalist friends in Iran.”

Only two days before her arrest in Tehran, she posted pictures from Kashan’s Tabatabai House, a late 19th-century mansion turned into a museum well known for its beautiful shades of blue — “50 shades of blue,” as she put it in her caption in Russian. Before that, she had posted images of hawkers selling pomegranates on the roads of central Iran — in other words, all the signs that she was a tourist. 

Yuzik clearly had a special affection for Iran, often posting about the country on Instagram. In November 2018, she re-published a poster of Ghasem Soleimani, the feared commander of IRGC’s Quds Force and Iran’s main general in its regional wars. The Game of Thrones-themed poster was a response to a similar one of US President Donald Trump. She had got the image from “her Iranian friends,” she said. Prior to this, she had posted pictures of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1976 trip to Tehran. 

The allegations of Israeli ties most probably have to do with a trip she took about 20 years ago to cover daily life in the Israeli army for the major Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. Despite rumors on Russian social media, her ex-husband, Boris Voytsekhovskiy, confirmed that she did not hold Israeli citizenship and she had not been to Israel since that trip. 

Journalist and Critic of Putin 

In addition to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yuzik has written for Russian Newsweek and has even reported from Tehran, but her recent trips to Iran have all been in a personal capacity. In December 2017, she posted pictures on her Instagram of a vacation to Tehran. 

She is best known for her years of reporting from the North Caucasian districts of Russia. The reports were the basis of her 2003 book Brides of Allah about women and child suicide bombers from Chechnya. Her other book, Beslan Dictionary, is also about the Chechen conflicts. The books have been published in 10 countries, including France, Germany and Italy. 

Her work has been controversial in more than one way. Like many journalists covering the Chechen conflict, the pro-Kremlin media has accused her of cozying up to Islamists and undermining the Russian state efforts in Chechnya. Yet others have accused her of the opposite. Oge Borkgreving, an advisor to the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, claimed that her reports “distorted the picture of conflict in Chechnya” and that her “conspiratorial thought” saw Islamists as collaborating with human rights organizations and Western intelligence services. 

Yuzik is upfront in her criticism of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his policies in the Muslim-majority Caucasian districts of the Russian Federation. In the last parliamentary elections in 2016, she ran as an opposition candidate for the Muslim-majority republic of Dagestan, Russia’s southernmost district and adjacent to Chechnya. She ran on a Parnas (People’s Freedom Party) ticket, although she wasn’t a member of the party, and her candidacy was backed by Russian oligarch Mikhai Khodorkovsky’s Open Elections project. Polish-owned Belorussian opposition Belsat TV made a documentary about her campaign in which she spoke of her desire to “contribute to the coming changes in Russia.”

Parnas failed to win more than 0.07 percent of the vote in Dagestan, and 88.0 percent went to Putin’s United Russia Party, which has deep links with local magnates all over the Caucasus. 

The film introduces her as having been born in 1981 in Russia’s Rostov region near the Russo-Ukrainian border. Some pro-Kremlin media, however, claim that she was actually born in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk and backs the anti-Moscow opposition movements there. 

“Don’t believe the social media conspiracy theories in Russia,” Yuzik’s friend told IranWire. “She is a journalist like you and I. Because she worked on sensitive topics like Chechnya, they invented all kinds of conspiracies about her.”