The Russian Yelena Miláshina, the most successful journalist of the illegal Russian media outlet Nóvaya Gazeta, has suffered a brutal attack in Chechnya, where she traveled to attend a trial, her colleagues reported on Tuesday.
"Several masked men brutally beat Yelena and Aleksandr (Nemov, a lawyer who accompanied her), took their phones, demanded that they unlock them and destroyed their equipment and documents," denounced Nóvaya Gazeta. "They hit them with sticks and gave them stops," the outlet added.
The newspaper notes that Milashina, who has several broken fingers, was sprayed with a green antiseptic and fainted several times after the assault, including at the hospital, where she was taken. Nemov in turn presents a stab wound.
Russian People's Ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova spoke to Milashina by phone and promised that the attack would be investigated in a "thorough" manner. "Those responsible must be punished," she said.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said for his part that President Vladimir Putin had been informed about the attack on Milashina and Nemov and stated that it is a "very serious attack" that requires "energetic measures."
Milashina had traveled to Chechnya to attend the reading of the sentence of Zarema Musaeva, mother of some Chechen activists, accused of assaulting a police officer.
The journalist from Nóvaya Gazeta, specialized in human rights issues, has not lived in Russia since February 2022, when she left the country due to threats from the Chechen authorities.
The threats that Miláshina received for her journalistic work, compared to those made by the murdered Anna Politkóvskaya, were also previously denounced by Amnesty International.
