© vk.com / Геннадий Можейко
A reporter for one of Russia's best-read news outlets has been detained and is being held by authorities in Belarus. While details of the arrest are unclear, his editors at
Komsomolskaya Pravda claim he was abducted in Moscow.
Over the weekend, Gennady Mozheiko's mother told journalists her son was being held in an isolation cell in Minsk. Mozheiko, a Belarusian national working for the local branch of the paper had been staying at a hotel in the Russian capital when his apartment back home was raided by police on
charges of incitement to hatred and insulting a government official.
Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that its correspondent had been detained in Moscow. "Nobody tells us anything and we're asking everyone," the tabloid's editor-in-chief Vladimir Sungorkin said.
"We expect this from Minsk, but we can't get any confirmation from Moscow."
The Kremlin has since denied any involvement in Mozheiko's detention, with President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,
refusing to rule out the possibility that he had been captured and taken abroad. "We do not have any reliable information about where the arrest of the journalist took place," he said. "We simply do not know."
Peskov also bluntly stated that
"there is no feeling, right now, that our position is being heard in Minsk." He confirmed that Putin himself was aware of the situation around the journalist, outlining that such actions against the press should not be approved, but the Kremlin does not know the details.
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