Chechnya Milashina attack: Armed thugs beat up Russian journalist and lawyer

Prominent investigative journalist Yelena Milashina has been badly beaten and had fingers broken by masked men as she travelled to a court in the Russian republic of Chechnya, colleagues say.

Ms Milashina has received death threats in the past from Chechnya's notorious leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

She was travelling with a lawyer, Alexander Nemov, who was also attacked.

They had just arrived at the airport ahead of a jail term given to the mother of three exiled Kadyrov critics.

Their car was stopped as they drove to the capital, Grozny, to witness the imposition of a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence on Zarema Musayeva, who was detained by Chechen security forces in January 2022 in her flat in western Russia on charges condemned as politically motivated.

"It was a classic kidnapping," Yelena Milashina, who writes for Novaya Gazeta newspaper, told a Chechen human rights official in hospital in Grozny. "They pinned down then threw our driver out of his car, climbed in, bent our heads down, tied my hands, forced me to my knees and put a pistol to my head."

Her employer said she had suffered an internal brain injury and had fingers broken. She also had her head shaved and her face doused in green dye.

Alexander Nemov was also injured. Rights group Crew against Torture posted an image showing a gash in his leg, which it said was presumably a knife wound.

Ms Milashina fled Russia for some time in February 2022 after Kadyrov called her a terrorist, adding that "we have always eliminated terrorists and their accomplices". She was attacked in 2020 alongside another lawyer, Marina Dubrovina.

Her investigative reporting detailing human rights abuses in Chechnya followed in the footsteps of two women who were murdered for their own brave work. In 2006 Novaya Gazeta colleague Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow, while her friend and campaigner Natalia Estemirova was abducted and shot in Grozny.

Ms Milashina told the BBC's Ukrainecast only last week that she was fully aware that Kadyrov and his entourage could "easily fulfil" the death threats he had issued.

"I'm kind of getting used to it because, several times almost every year, Kadyrov is passing threats to my address or the address of journalists of Novaya Gazeta... He behaves like [he's] the owner of the Chechnya region".

Ramzan Kadyrov is one of Vladimir Putin's staunchest supporters and a cheerleader for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has been widely accused of ordering extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture.

Last year he sent Chechen troops, known as "Kadyrovtsy", into Ukraine where they have built a reputation for brutality. He has also been linked to the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

He was handed the presidency of the southern Russian republic by Mr Putin in 2007 three years after his father was assassinated as president in 2004.

When Zarema Musayeva, 53, was detained by Chechen security officers last year, 1,800km (1,120 miles) north of Grozny, Kadyrov said the entire family should either be "in prison or underground".

Musayeva's three sons all fled Chechnya after they spoke out online about the Chechen leader's human rights abuses. Her husband, a former judge, was at one point detained, but also fled.