Alsu Kurmasheva is an American Journalist Detained in Russia

Why has her case not received the attention as it deserves?

Journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, credit RFE/RL

About an hour after I published today’s Global Dispatches episode about an American journalist detained in Russia, I saw this Associated Press report that Alsu Kurmasheva has been sentenced to six years in a Russian jail on the spurious charge of “spreading false information about the Russian military.”

If you’ve not listened to the episode yet, the story is this: Alsu Kurmasheva is a Russian-born naturalized American citizen who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She mostly covers cultural stories for the Tatar language service of RFE/RL. Last year, she traveled to Russia to visit her elderly mother. On her way home, she was detained at the airport and had her passport confiscated. She was later sent to prison, denied consular access, and held more or less incommunicado.

That was the sad state of play when I interviewed her husband Pavel Butorin, who is also a journalist for RFE/RL. As he explained to me last week, there is no transpar…