Kasem, the former editor-in-chief of Sputnik Lithuania, surrendered to Latvian special services

Marat Kasem, a former employee of the pro-Russian mass media “Sputnik Litva”, surrendered to the Latvian special services and does not intend to return to Russia. About this

In an interview with Russian journalist Ilya Azar for Novaya Gazeta Evropa, Kasem said that after the start of the war against Ukraine, he “came to his senses” and wanted nothing more to do with Russia.

Kasem is a citizen of Latvia. He came to Riga at the end of 2022 for family reasons. On January 3, he was detained by the Security Service of Latvia – Kasem was suspected of espionage and violation of European Union sanctions. In January 2023, he was arrested, after which he was detained in the Central Riga prison.

The Russian Foreign Ministry then called it a violation of human rights and freedoms, and pro-Kremlin media workers Dmytro Kiselev and Maria Butina picketed the Latvian embassy with placards “Marat, we’re with you” and “Hands off Russian journalists.”

At the end of April, Kasem was released on recognizance. In the summer of last year, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, reported that Kasem had left Latvia.

“Gradually, the indignation died down, and in the summer it turned out that Kasem was already at liberty – he paid 15 thousand euros for illegal intellectual and physical support of the Russian Federation and that was it. The Latvian media out of inertia wrote that he had gone to Moscow, but it quickly became clear that he was a Latvian citizen not gathering,” Azar wrote in a telegram.

As Kasem himself said in an interview, he “came to Latvia not empty-handed, but with gifts for the Latvian special services, at the mercy of which he was deliberately going to surrender,” Azar noted.

In an interview with Azar, Kasem also called the killing of civilians in Buch in early 2022 a genocide of the Ukrainian people, and also called the Russian attack on the Baltic states highly likely.

• After the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the European Union banned the work of the Sputnik agency and the RT channel on the territory of EU countries. The ban was introduced until the end of the war and until Russia and its associated mass media “stop disinformation and information manipulation against the EU.”
• Even before the introduction of the ban at the EU level, Latvia banned the publication of the Rossiya Segodnya holding, which includes Sputnik, on its territory. There they explained it as personal EU sanctions against the general director of the holding Dmitry Kiselyov.

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