More than 20 Karelian journalists left the Union of Journalists of Russia

More than 20 journalists from Karelia left the Union of Journalists of Russia. Most of them are laureates of the all-Russian competition “Pravda and Justice”, reports the newspaper “Stolitsa na Onego” without reference to the source.

At the end of April, the Chairman of the Union of Journalists of Karelia Georgy Chentemirov and board member Natalya Sevets-Ermolina were expelled from the organization after the Ministry of Justice entered them into the register of “foreign agents”.

Due to the exclusion of Chentemirov and Ermolina, the Karelian journalist Maksym Bershtein and the former chairman of the Karelian Union of Journalists Natalya Meshkova left the organization.

“Today, in the leadership of the Union of Journalists of Russia, there are, among others, nomenclature workers, hooligans and simply weak-hearted people. That is, characters who, due to their personal qualities, are not capable of being journalists. They are in the same organization and I used to consider them a terrible compromise, but now they are cut off the last anchors,” Berstein wrote on his VKontakte page on April 30.

“Contrary to the line of the Moscow media bosses, the Karelian Union strictly followed the professional charter, there was no shame for our union,” Meshkova emphasized in a post on May 1. “Do not participate in the harassment of colleagues, do not vote for dubious candidates for the position of the new chairman, do not side with the persecutors, who have trampled our notion of journalism, who are turning to the language of enmity even towards their recent comrades”

• The head of the Union of Journalists of Karelia, Georgy Chentemirov, left Russia in October 2022. Before leaving, the journalist reported on the harassment he was subjected to after the publication of several publications in which he was accused of being “black” and “lacking patriotism.” The Union of Journalists of Karelia issued an appeal in support of a colleague.
• In April 2023, the Ministry of Justice entered Chentemirov in the register of “foreign agents”. After that, the head of the Union of Journalists of Russia, Vladimir Solovyov, demanded that Chentemirov be removed from the post of chairman of the Karelian Union of Journalists. The journalist refused to submit credentials.
• Natalya Sevets-Ermolina is a Karelian activist, journalist and owner of the socio-cultural platform and art space Agriculture Club, where youth master classes and lectures were held. After the announcement of mobilization in September 2022, she left Russia.