In Harm's Way

By ANDREW MEIER/MOSCOW

Inside a cramped apartment on Moscow's eastern edge, Lyudmila Babitskaya never moves far from the television or telephone. For more than a month, she has been waiting to learn the fate of her husband Andrei Babitsky, a U.S.-funded Radio Liberty reporter who disappeared in Chechnya. "It started as a nightmare," she says of her vigil, "but it's turning into a horror story."

Detained by Russian soldiers as he left the ruins of Grozny on Jan. 16, Babitsky, who had broadcast hard-hitting reports about Russian casualties and brutalities in Chechnya, was held incommunicado for 12 days. Later his wife learned he had been in a prison where the Russians claim to "filter" terrorists from civilians--using torture, according to human-rights groups. On Feb. 3 the Russians suddenly made a deal with the Chechens to swap Babitsky for two Russian POWs. The outrage was immediate. "What kind of state arrests a journalist and then uses him in a POW swap?" asks Radio Liberty's Moscow editor, Mikhail Sokolov.

On Feb. 9 a video surfaced in Moscow in which a weary-looking Babitsky said, "I hope I will be back home soon." Last week Alexander Yevtushenko, a Pravda correspondent, reported that former inmates of a prison in Gudermes claimed to have seen Babitsky looking physically and psychologically beaten. For those attempting to predict the future of Russia, the ongoing plight of Babitsky is an ominous sign. The Chechen war has been waged under a news blockade, but now Russian journalists fear that a new campaign is emerging against the press itself.

--By Andrew Meier/Moscow