The Moscow-based German journalist Ulrich Heyden, who has been covering Russian affairs for a wide variety of German media for over three decades, recently learned that his German bank, the Hamburger Sparkasse, is cancelling his bank account, apparently for reasons relating to the EU’s Russia sanctions. According to Heyden, writing on his Telegram channel, this is what he was told by a bank employee with whom he spoke by telephone, although the written cancellation notice he received merely refers to the bank “reviewing … its business relationships with clients who have their residence in Russia.” Heyden notes that he lives exclusively from the fees of German, Swiss, and Austrian media that are paid into his German account.
Two other German journalists who live in Russia, Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, were placed on the EU sanctions list last May, resulting in the freezing of their EU-based bank accounts. The EU accuses Lipp and Röper of spreading pro-Russian “war propaganda” and “misinformation.” Heyden, however, does not figure on the sanctions list.
Moreover, unlike Lipp and Röper, whom the EU describes as mere “bloggers,” Heyden is—or, at any rate, was—very much a mainstream journalist. As he notes in the open letter to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that he published on his Telegram channel, he was for ten years a contributor to the German public radio Deutschlandfunk, for thirteen years the Moscow correspondent of the daily paper the Sächsische Zeitung, and for no less than thirty years a contributor to the center-left intellectual weekly Freitag. He has also written for such likewise thoroughly mainstream venues as the Tagesspiegel, the Rheinische Merkur, and the German edition of the Financial Times.
Like Lipp and Röper, however, Heyden has tried in recent years, now writing mostly for alternative online outlets, to provide a more balanced view of the Ukraine conflict and to report on Russia, as he puts it, “with understanding and not foaming at the mouth.” Showing any understanding of the Russian side of the conflict would appear to be controversial in the German public discussion nowadays. “Putinversteher”—literally, someone who understands Putin—is an actual slur that is commonly used in the discussion.
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