Russia shuts down CBC’s Moscow bureau in retaliation for Canada’s ban of its state broadcaster

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This article was published 17/05/2022 (911 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — For Canada’s parliamentarians, Russia’s decision to shut down CBC-Radio Canada’s Moscow bureau and revoke the visas of Canadian broadcast journalists covering that country is political.

“The truth, responsible journalism, sharing what’s actually going on with citizens is a deep threat to Vladimir Putin in his illegal war and his authoritarian tendencies,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa.

For CBC’s long-time Moscow-based producer Corinne Seminoff, who co-ordinated the public network’s coverage of Russia for much of her 36-year career, it is as personal as it is a professional blow.

“I think we have to keep telling the story of what is going on in Russia, why they are doing the things that they do,” she said in an interview with the Star from Ukraine. “It’s a very big story. It’s very important. It has many implications for the world.”

Russia claimed the ouster is in retaliation for Ottawa’s ban in March on Kremlin-backed RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and RT France, from being broadcast in Canada.

Seminoff has been Canada’s eyes and ears in Russia for weeks after Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russia criminalized negative media reporting of its armed forces and any reference to the incursion into Ukraine as a “war,” threatening journalists with up to 15 years in jail. Several Western outlets including CBC and Radio-Canada reassigned their reporters to cover the war from elsewhere in eastern Europe.

But Seminoff remained in Moscow for several weeks longer, newsgathering and sending pictures to the network’s reporters now outside the country.

By April 1, Seminoff was the only Canadian journalist working for a Canadian media outlet in Moscow and by then getting “strong signals” she was no longer welcome, she said. She left to join correspondents Briar Stewart and Radio-Canada’s Tamara Alteresco in Latvia, still thinking she’d be back.

Now she is not so sure. Last week, the Russian government said she could return on a three-month visa. On Wednesday, a top Russian Foreign Ministry official who never usually speaks to her rang Seminoff’s cellphone in Ukraine.

He asked if she’d seen that day’s news conference by Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. Seminoff had not. When he said flatly the CBC bureau was being shut and their visas and media accreditation revoked, Seminoff was stunned, even arguing with him that Canada wasn’t the only country that had banned RT. The official’s reply was short. Today was only Canada’s turn.

“When they bluntly tell you on that official level ‘it’s over,’ I said to him, ‘this can’t be happening, are you serious?’” Seminoff said in an interview late Wednesday.

Seminoff, a Canadian, has Russian family background and speaks Russian fluently. Her journalistic career began in the former Soviet Union, first in 1986 with CBS News, and then in 1989 with the CBC’s former correspondent Don Murray, she helped the network tell Canadians the story of the collapse of that regime. Even after she was posted back to Canada, Seminoff returned frequently to produce network coverage of major Russian stories and documentaries, lobbying for the return of English correspondents in 2017 after a brief interruption after the 2014 Crimea annexation, and has led the Moscow bureau there ever since.

On Wednesday, Seminoff said the Russian official told her she would be allowed to enter once more — to pack up her apartment, finalize her affairs, and get out for good.

“I still haven’t had enough time to process everything, from the ‘special operation’ to leaving in April,” and having to leave behind the network’s small group of locally-hired camera operators and fixers. “I feel absolutely devastated. And I’m very worried about our Russian staff.”

Trudeau said it’s “unfortunate but not surprising,” that Putin is trying to “shut down strong journalistic institutions,” as he reiterated that Canada “will always stand up for a free strong independent press doing its work of challenging and revealing what’s going on in the world.”

Others echoed that in the halls of the House of Commons Wednesday.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Putin is trying to cover up the “horrible reality” of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and said there is a “major difference” in how Canada came to its decision to block Russian propaganda on airwaves here, saying it was “a totally independent based decision by the CRTC, by the regulator that has been regulating broadcasting for the last 50 years. They’re experts on the field.”

Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News, wrote on Twitter that “to our knowledge, this is the first time in the history of CBC/Radio-Canada that a foreign government has forced the closure of one of our bureaus.”

Fenlon said the organization is “deeply disappointed,” having maintained a bureau in Moscow for more than 44 years.

“Our journalism is completely independent of the Canadian government and we are saddened to see the Russian government conflate the two,” he wrote.

Seminoff said for now she and Stewart will continue to report from Ukraine, “and the plan was to continue to cover Russia in some way. So we will have to regroup and figure out how we do that.”

“It’s not entirely clear how we do that, but we will do that from somewhere in the region. I think we have to keep telling the story of what is going on in Russia.”

Tonda MacCharles is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @tondamacc