I thought the Kremlin wouldn’t come for me – then I got expelled from Russia

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford had felt the brutality of Putin’s regime first-hand – but, as she explains, losing her home still came as a shock

It was early morning on 10 August 2021 when Sarah Rainsford, the BBC’s Russia correspondent, was detained. At border control in Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow, a man in a glass booth asked her to step to one side.
At 8.24, she messaged her husband: ‘It’s not good.’ At 8.50 she messaged the British ambassador: ‘Guess there is nothing the embassy can do.’ At 9.15, she was called into an office by a lieutenant colonel of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Reading from a piece of paper, a guard told her she was banned from entering the country as a threat to national security. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I’m a threat to the Russian Federation?’ she remembers saying. ‘Do I look like a threat? I’m a journalist… You realise this is politics? What did I do? What article did I write?’
She was subsequently released and given three weeks to leave the country she had come to think of as home. She became the first BBC journalist to be expelled since Tim Sebastian, who was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1985 along with 24 other British nationals.
Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be launched six months later, in February 2022. Meanwhile, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was being held in prison, having defiantly returned to Russia from Germany after an attempt to murder him with a Novichok nerve agent. He died in February 2024 – of unsubstantiated ‘sudden death syndrome’ in a harsh penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.
Rainsford, now 51, had spent years reporting in Russia, but she’d never been the story herself: ‘It felt very strange.’ Her detention at the airport provoked anger at first – ‘like a teenager stamping her foot’, she says. Fear came later.
She had reported not only on Navalny, Putin’s most famous and charismatic opponent, but also on many less well-known voices speaking out against the Kremlin: human rights activists; Russian investigative journalists daring to stand up to Putin in print, on websites or anywhere but the state-controlled media; and Navalny’s new generation of followers. The list of imprisonments and deaths was growing longer: Anna Politkovskaya, the extraordinary journalist, was shot dead near her home in 2006; the anti-corruption activist Boris Nemtsov was banned from state TV and then fatally shot in 2015; Vladimir Kara-Murza, his protégé, was poisoned and would later be imprisoned (he was given a 25-year sentence last year, and has already spent close to 300 days in solitary confinement); he has just been released as part of a prison swap; human rights activist Oleg Orlov has since been sentenced for discrediting the Russian military.
When Rainsford was detained, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (for which Politkovskaya had written before her murder) was about to declare a ‘mass exodus’ from Russia, put down in large part to what it called the ‘collapsing space for human and civil rights’.
Investigative website Proekt had been banned a month earlier. The list of ‘foreign agents’, ‘undesirables’ and ‘extremists’ was multiplying. Each Friday, the justice ministry announced new additions to the blacklist of ‘foreign agents’. More than 100 were added in 2021.
‘The relationship with the West had been plummeting for a long time and things were getting worse, but there was nothing that made me think the BBC would be targeted or that I would be targeted,’ Rainsford says today, from her home in Warsaw, Poland. ‘I think all of the foreign correspondents in Russia thought our accreditation was a form of protection. We have a foreign ministry card that says we are accredited to work and our visas are linked to that. It’s not a diplomatic status, but it is a status of some sort and the Kremlin takes it seriously. I was reporting all the time on what was happening to Russian journalists and Russian people, the repressions and the increasing difficulties, but you still think, “They won’t come for me.”
‘But they come for everybody. There are no limits any more. We tell ourselves, in order to carry on doing the job, that we will be safe. “I’ll be OK. They won’t come for me. I’m a woman, I’m married, I work for the BBC…” But the reality is none of these things matter. They’ll come for whoever they want, whenever they want. And it’s really, really hideous. The only thing we know now is that there are no rules. Almost all the independent Russian journalists have left – and many of the foreign ones too.’
As it turns out, Rainsford was just the first of the international press to be expelled, although she didn’t know it back then: ‘I think I was just angry when it happened, rather than scared. But it did feel personal. It felt like it was about Britain, about the BBC and about me.’
Less than two years later, in March 2023, the young American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was arrested by the FSB. He was charged with espionage, which the US government and his newspaper vehemently deny. On 19 July this year he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony, but has just been released a part of a prisoner swap, along with former US Marine Paul Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American editor for the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was detained in December on charges of spreading ‘false information’. 
And last month, a Moscow court sentenced Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist, author and New York Times columnist, in absentia to eight years in prison, apparently over comments about atrocities the Russian military is accused of committing in Ukraine.
It is a bleak night in Warsaw. Though it is summer, a storm has hit the city so violently that trees are shaking. This became Rainsford’s eventual new base as BBC Eastern Europe correspondent after her expulsion from Russia three years ago, despite the BBC and the consulate trying to get the decision reversed. BBC director-general Tim Davie stated that ‘the expulsion of Sarah Rainsford is a direct assault on media freedom which we condemn unreservedly’.
Rainsford chose Poland for its proximity to Ukraine and the fact she could monitor Russian stories of repression. For two years, she has reported on the full-scale invasion – after initially believing it would never happen; the cities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the thousands of lives lost and the unspeakable torture of civilians. It was after the invasion that she called Putin a liar on air.
She is now about to publish a book, Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War. It is the story of how Rainsford fell out of love with Russia after 30 years – a country she once called home, and which, with all of its cultural excitements and differences, and its early promise of new freedoms, had helped to distract her from the grief of losing her mother when she was a student.
She first visited, aged 18, two weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, with a suitcase full of cheese-sauce mix and chocolate to ensure she had enough to eat, ‘and a guidebook to a country that had ceased to exist’.
When she was just 21 and not long back from another trip to Russia (her year abroad while reading Russian at Cambridge), her mother collapsed and died in her arms in Worcestershire, after a routine hernia operation. In time her father remarried and moved away from Worcestershire, and Rainsford moved to Russia with her husband, Kes, a writer she had met at Cambridge. He has accompanied her on postings ever since.
In the course of her long career, Rainsford has witnessed immense suffering, most recently in Ukraine. After the first five years in Russia officially with the BBC (2000 to 2005), she was based in Turkey, Spain and Cuba. She covered Ukraine in 2014 when Russian-backed militants took over parts of the east of the country (‘very scary’), returning to Russia full-time that year. ‘I’m not made of steel. I’m not a massively courageous or tough kind of person. I cry a lot [off-camera] when I’m reporting. I think if you don’t care what people are telling you, you are in the wrong job. But my motivation has always been to make sure the suffering I hear about is seen and heard by as many people as possible. And I was much happier [professionally] to be in Ukraine during the war, gathering evidence on the ground, rather than giving a voice to the Kremlin manipulating the truth from Russia. I’m never scared to ask questions.’
Rainsford was no stranger to FSB intimidation when she was detained at the airport. She had been trailed openly when covering the Russia-hosted World Cup in 2018, and on at least one other occasion when in Lithuania. There was the time she returned to her flat to find both lavatories full of faeces, ‘a classic FSB calling card’. (The BBC asked her to install a sensor monitor but she couldn’t make it work.) One associate had got home to find the hall of his apartment ‘awash with’ animal blood. There were stories of people photographed without their knowledge only to find their pictures on explicit gay websites. She had heard about doctors’ surgeries being targeted, the staff asked to hand over medical details which could be a tool for intimidation.
But none of this had rattled her: ‘I think when you live in Russia, you always assume somebody is monitoring you at some point; that’s your background hum. But we were increasingly going on stories where we realised we were being openly trailed. And when I found the faeces in the flat, I did think, “Of course they have been in here.”’
The day before she was stopped at the airport, she had grilled Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and Putin ally, live on Belarusian state television, a year after his disputed re-election had provoked large-scale protest. He shouted at her, calling her and the UK in general ‘American lapdogs’ and saying that Britain could ‘choke on [its] sanctions’. It was assumed by independent Russian journalists that this had been the provocation for her removal. But even a year before, her visa status had become increasingly tenuous, the length reducing incrementally with each renewal. She had three weeks left on her last one when she was detained.
At some point a senior Russian source described her as ‘hostage’ to the political situation. ‘He said, “You are the ammunition. We just haven’t yet decided when to fire.”’ Rainsford says, ‘There were lots of us in Moscow, and they chose me. People have said, “You must wear it like a badge of honour. Your reporting must have gotten under their skin,” but it’s hard, in the moment, to think of it like that.’
The day after the airport, she was called to a meeting and formally told she was being expelled. The security guard of her apartment block was in tears when she returned and explained. ‘He offered to marry me,’ she says. But the same man had also let the ‘visitors’ into her flat when they left the faecal deposits. ‘Of course he would,’ she says. ‘No question. He would have had no choice.’
Rainsford is measured, and clearly keen to downplay the fact that she was very scared during those last weeks in Russia, before she slipped away with Kes late one night. A large part of her fear was rooted in the way the FSB had made her sign a document at the airport in which she admitted being a threat to national security. ‘What could I do?’ she says of signing it. ‘I was in custody. I was in an airport. They had my passport. I didn’t have any rights that I could exercise.
‘And then the more I started to find out [about the reasons why], the more nervous I was.’
Her expulsion, it turned out, was nothing to do with her questioning in Belarus, but directly linked to what Russia called the effective expulsion from Britain of a Russian ‘journalist’ affiliated with the state news agency Tass two years earlier, a man referred to by one source as an ‘undeclared Russian agent’. She could find no record of his work as a reporter, but was too terrified to dig deeper during those weeks. Dominic Raab, then foreign secretary, was on holiday in Greece on 10 August. His juniors were reluctant to disturb him. Really? ‘Well,’ she says diplomatically. ‘The consulate was brilliant.’
‘I’d spent so long reporting on spy cases and I knew what they did to people accused of espionage. I wasn’t sleeping, I felt sick. I was imagining horrible scenarios, like them arresting me, or planting something on me, or doing something to Kes, or even poisoning the dog.’
She knew she wasn’t being overdramatic. Two years later, Evan Gershkovich would become the first Western reporter to face a charge of spying in Russia since the Cold War. It is Kes who says, over supper, ‘You were the first targeted foreign journalist, Sarah. They took Evan, but it started with you.’ He has tears in his eyes. His loss is palpable, too.
The lawyer the BBC consulted was clear. Rainsford needed to get out immediately. She held a small leaving party but ‘there weren’t many journalists left in Russia who could attend’.
‘People said, “Oh you are coming home [to England],” but Russia was more than my job, it was my life. It was my home. I’d lived there on and off since 1992.’
Rainsford arrived in London if not exactly jobless then certainly untethered, a foreign correspondent without a home or a country on which to report. ‘I think I had an identity crisis. I knew that I was still a journalist and that I worked for the BBC, and it was supportive, but I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was. My identity had been wrapped up for so many years with Russia.’
The threat had taken its toll: ‘There was a van parked outside our Airbnb in Tooting which I became convinced was full of FSB agents monitoring me.’
The BBC gave her three months to recover. It would take another three, following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for her love of Russia to turn to loathing. She was reporting in eastern Ukraine when the first bombs fell and has returned on and off ever since. In a chapter of her book titled ‘Bodies’, she recalls being taken through a morgue in the Kharkiv region, housing bodies from the city of Izyum, which had been occupied by Russian troops and then liberated. Body bags were heaped on the floor, one on top of the other, ‘some muddy, as if they had been dragged along the floor or even stepped on to reach other bodies towards the back’. Some bodies, she was told, were in such a state that it was impossible even to establish their gender. The unidentified dead had been found buried in a pine forest on the edge of the city.
By late 2022, 451 bodies had been unearthed in Izyum, seven of which were children, and a number of body parts. Families were living among ruins, searching for lost loved ones. This is the story of one city’s devastation. Rainsford carries many more inside her.
Soon after she returned to England, she visited her mother’s grave. It had been years since she was there. Researching her book prompted Rainsford to re-examine diaries and letters from when her mother was alive – she used to write to Rainsford in Russia, even sending a birthday cake. She died at 50: ‘I wish I could have had a proper friendship with her, as a grown up. She never met Kes.’
Rainsford’s book, her ‘personal reckoning’, is dedicated to her parents: ‘I won’t [publish] another book ever again,’ she says. (I’m not sure I believe her. She has already written one about her time in Cuba.) ‘But I needed to write this, I think because I felt shame – after the war on Ukraine – for my old feelings for Russia.’
The morning Rainsford was detained at the airport, she filmed herself crying, clips broadcast after she had left Russia. ‘I regret the film of me crying now because I still meet people who think I love Russia. Being expelled was shocking at the time, though, and a big deal for the BBC.’ The book is her way of rejecting Russia, expelling it from her life as it expelled her.
The BBC maintains a presence in the country – Steve Rosenberg is its Russia editor – but it is nowhere near as large as it once was. Rainsford will not be drawn on how correspondents in Russia stay safe from detainment and charges of espionage, except to say there is a need for constant assessment of how their reporting will play with the Kremlin.
Her own book is deeply critical. Is she still at risk? ‘I’m a blip on their consciousness. I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote it. I was thinking more, “If I die tomorrow, I don’t want to be that person who cried in the airport, that person who was in love with Russia.”
‘Putin is a liar. He and the Kremlin tell lies on a daily basis. There is no pussyfooting around that fact. My job is to report facts… Russia today is an exporter of profound lies, which are terribly disruptive to our Western order. There is no justification for the war on Ukraine apart from Putin’s paranoia and imperial ambitions.’
Warsaw is home, for now: ‘Poland is an opportunity for me to carry on doing the same sort of work… But how long will I be here? I don’t know.’
The morning after we meet, the sun is shining. Warsaw feels like a different city. Rainsford messages me: ‘I’d like to think another Russia is possible one day: the kind of country people like Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politkovskaya dreamed of and where people like Vladimir Kara-Murza would be free. But right now, that Russia feels further away than ever.’
Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War, by Sarah Rainsford (Bloomsbury, £22), is published on 15 August; pre-order from The Telegraph Bookshop here
Moscow, May 2015
Three months after Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on the bridge beside the Kremlin, his close friend and political protégé was fighting for his life in a Moscow hospital. By the time Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife made it to his bedside, his vital organs were shutting down. When Evgenia tried to find out what had caused such catastrophic problems, the chief doctor was blunt to the point of cruelty. ‘Imagine a train. It crushes you. Does it matter what train it was?’ She was told her husband’s chances of survival were around five per cent.
As reports started coming in that the opposition activist was critically ill, I spoke to his father, a well-known journalist. Kara-Murza was in a coma, doctors were still doing tests and his father was cautious at first about suggesting any kind of foul play. An editor in London suggested the very fact an activist had fallen so ill might be a story, so soon after Nemtsov had been shot, but I hesitated. I didn’t know Kara-Murza personally then, but I knew he’d been devastated by his friend’s murder and a doctor had mentioned antidepressants.
I was wary of putting a BBC label on the suggestion of suspicious circumstances if there was even a possibility that he might have overdosed.
A few days later, I spoke to Kara-Murza’s father again. By then he was sure the ‘nuclear reaction’ taking place in his son’s body was not down to any normal medication. After that interview,
I filed my story. ‘The father of a Russian opposition activist has told the BBC he believes the sudden, severe illness of his son is suspicious. “It’s clear he’s been poisoned,” he said. “But by what or who, we don’t know.”’
At that point, the attempted assassination of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny with nerve agent was still five years in the future. But Kremlin opponents were already prone to sudden, mysterious ailments. In 2004 the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was taken violently ill as she flew to cover the siege of a school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists. She was sure she’d been poisoned. That same month in Ukraine, the pro-Western candidate for president, Viktor Yushchenko, was left in excruciating pain from a dioxin. His head swelled and lesions filled with pus appeared all over his body. The list goes on.
In 2015 Kara-Murza’s medical team could not fathom the cause of his devastating symptoms. He was 33, and usually fit, but now he had doctors discussing heart failure, kidney problems and pneumonia. His family brought in an Israeli medic who confirmed the symptoms could have been caused by an unknown toxin but couldn’t be more specific. The whole idea of poisoning is to make it hard to trace and treat and Kara-Murza’s medical team focused firmly on the second part. He was in a coma for a week with his wife at his bedside throughout ‘guarding him like a dog’. The couple had met at school, become teenage sweethearts and married soon after they graduated from university. Evgenia describes her husband as her partner, lover and best friend. As he lay unconscious, she talked to him non-stop, sharing news from home about their three children in the hope he could hear. She remembers chiding him that he had to wake up because he still had a documentary to finish about Nemtsov, and she couldn’t do it without him.
Finally, he defied terrible odds and regained consciousness. It was several weeks before Kara-Murza was strong enough to leave hospital in Moscow. But in July 2015, Evgenia got him on to an air ambulance and out to the US. In hospital there she poured all her energy into getting him better, helping him to walk again and even teaching him to hold a spoon. Her husband was impatient. Back home and regaining strength, he would insist on staggering down from their bedroom to work from the sofa. ‘He had all these lasting effects of the poison,’ Evgenia told me, years later. ‘So he would work and then throw up every half-hour and then go back to work. And I would be there, feeding him spoonfuls of yoghurt.’
It took Kara-Murza six months to recover in the US from his poisoning, then he packed his bags and headed back to Moscow. His wife remembers it all as crazily fast. ‘As soon as Vladimir could limp, he limped to the airport.’ The activist was still using a walking stick and would never regain full feeling in his left foot and arm. He also suffered from dizziness and other symptoms. His determination to return to his work left Evgenia both scared and full of respect. ‘I love and I hate him for his integrity,’ she told me, later. ‘His fight is bigger than his fears.’
By that point, there was plenty to fear. The climate for those in opposition to the Kremlin was becoming even more overtly hostile. In February 2016 Nemtsov’s friend and a former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov had a cake slammed in his face in a Moscow restaurant. A few days later he was pelted with eggs by a crowd calling him a traitor and yelling at him to leave the country. Ever since her husband’s sudden illness, Evgenia had been sleeping with her phone beside her pillow whenever he travelled. On 2 February 2017 she received another terrifying call. It was Vladimir, calling from Moscow, where it was 05:00. He was due to take a flight back to the US and his family that day, but had woken with the same symptoms as before. His heart was racing and he was struggling to breathe. Within hours he was back in intensive care and in a coma. This time the chief doctor’s conclusion was clear and immediate. Kara-Murza had suffered ‘poisoning by an unknown substance’. Whoever was responsible had probably banked on him being mid-flight when the toxin kicked in, which would likely have been fatal.
It was shortly after that diagnosis that I met Evgenia in person for the first time in Moscow, where she’d rushed again to be by her husband’s side. His condition was still very unstable and she was scared, but she wanted the world to know what had happened in the hope that the spotlight might somehow help. We filmed a short and intense interview. Kara-Murza had known the risks in returning,
I learned, but came to Moscow again anyway. Evgenia refused to hide behind double meanings or half-spoken words, and she was clear and sure that her husband had been poisoned deliberately. ‘We know exactly what we’re dealing with here, we know what kind of government we’re talking about.’ I questioned why anyone would want Vladimir dead when he was no household name, unlike Nemtsov or Kasyanov. Evgenia pointed to his campaigning for the Magnitsky Act. ‘I believe my husband’s activity annoys many people. That’s what I think could have provoked them to do it.’ The sanctions targeted Russia’s most rich and powerful. Putin’s people.
As Kara-Murza lay on life support, the family took samples of his hair, nails and blood to send abroad for testing, though no one knew what toxin they were searching for or how long it might remain detectable. ‘I knew we would probably never find that substance,’ Evgenia told me. ‘But at least we had this poisoning diagnosis. A true one.’ From the US, the FBI confirmed it was investigating an intentional poisoning, but its full results on the toxin used have never been disclosed.
In 2023 Vladimir Kara Murza was sentenced to 25 years for spreading ‘false’ information about the Russian army and being ‘affiliated with an undesirable organisation’. He was sent to a harsh penal colony in Siberia where he spent 283 days in solitary confinement. On August 1 he was released as part of a prisoner swap.