The U.S. Granted These Journalists Asylum. Then It Fired Them.

Yomiuri Shimbun

a day ago

Aristide Economopoulos/For The Washington Post
Leonid Martynyuk is a Russian journalist who was working for Voice of America but was recently fired in the Trump administration's cuts at the government-funded news operation. Martynyuk came to the United States in 2014 and was later granted asylum.
When Leonid Martynyuk got off the train from Sochi to Krasnodar in southern Russia in the summer of 2014, a strange man bumped into him.
The man started yelling, refusing to leave, egging on a fight. He claimed Martynyuk pushed him – not the other way around. Martynyuk's soon-to-be-wife, Ekaterina, motioned to police officers, pleading to intervene and defuse the hostile situation.
But when the police arrived, they were only interested in interrogating Martynyuk – not the other man, who was released without questioning. 'This was when I was sure that the entire thing was an orchestrated set up to have me arrested,' Martynyuk later wrote in his application for political asylum in the United States.
Martynyuk spent 10 days in prison on charges of hooliganism. His real offense, he maintains, was criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. His crime was journalism. Martynyuk, then in his mid-30s, spent years writing critical reports about Putin alongside his mentor, the well-known political opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who previously served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s.
In one report, Nemtsov and Martynyuk detailed Putin's extensive wealth and opulence; in another, they detailed extensive corruption around the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Martynyuk also ran a popular YouTube channel.
When he was released from prison, Martynyuk's lawyer suggested that he and Ekaterina relocate to the United States for a short time, so the pair left for the New York area in October 2014. Four months later, two gunmen assassinated Nemtsov while he was walking home from dinner along a Moscow bridge.
'After that, I decided it would be dangerous to return,' Martynyuk recently told The Washington Post. He applied for political asylum, which the U.S. government granted two years later.
But now Martynyuk, who became a full citizen in 2024, is once again feeling the ire of a powerful government – this time, it's the United States.
On May 30, Martynyuk was one of more than 500 Voice of America staffers terminated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees the government-funded news service. Kari Lake, senior adviser to the USAGM, which oversees Voice of America and funds nonprofit news outlets with similar goals, says the agency represents government waste. The contractors fired could soon be joined by hundreds of full-time staffers, who are expected to be fired.
After Putin came to power in 1999, he gradually clamped down on independent media in the country. Martynyuk read, listened to and watched Voice of America's work as a young man in the early 2000s, and he learned English through a program at the time titled Special English. His history with the network goes back much further: His grandfather was a colonel in the Soviet Army, stationed in Lviv in the 1970s. At night, he would listen to VOA on the radio – in secret.
Martynyuk applied to work for VOA's fact-checking team, Polygraph. At the time of his firing, Polygraph employed one editor and three reporters, all of whom either received or had applied for political asylum.
Stacy Caplow, a Brooklyn Law School professor, who – along with students in her clinic – helped Martynyuk apply for asylum, told The Post that he was the quintessential asylum seeker. 'This was the kind of case where if they didn't grant asylum, there would be something wrong with the system,' she said. 'It's clear-cut. Asylum is designed for people like him.'
For foreign-born journalists who have found refuge not just in the U.S. but at Voice of America, losing their jobs feels like an existential threat – one that could stop them from working every day to speak truth to power, for the first time in their careers.
Nik Yarst, a video producer on the fact-checking team, also lost his job on May 30.
Yarst was a Sochi-based correspondent for the Public Television of Russia, also known as OTR, and reported extensively on corruption in Russia during the Olympics. He and a cameraman were driving to an interview with a Russian official when he was stopped by Russian police, who found narcotics in his car. Yarst, who later tested negative for a drug test, said the police slid the drugs into his car to arrest him. He served a year on house arrest, while his legal battle continued, and faced a 10-year prison sentence if convicted.
'After the Olympic Games were done, I decided to escape from the Russia,' Yarst told The Post. 'I asked for the political asylum here in the United States because I truly believed here the independent media exists. Here is freedom of speech. And I have to escape from Russia because I was facing prison or death.'
Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, said Russia was a different country back then – 'still quite authoritarian,' but there were still independent journalists, news organizations and human rights organizations. 'This was a time you could still operate in Russia, but Krasnodar region was one of the toughest to operate and had a very, very harsh governor who really went after journalists,' said Denber, who has known Yarst for many years and documented his story. 'Nik, sadly, was no exception.'
Yarst worked on an investigative story involving the kidnapping of a 6-year-old girl who had received a large inheritance, including land in the zone designated for construction of the Sochi Olympics. 'Her mother was murdered – before that, she had been threatened – and the girl was taken to Abkhazia,' Yarst told The Post. 'Her grandmother fought in court, trying to restore justice. We were helping her. That case was a boiling point.'
The story, which involved allegations of corruption and improper land seizure by the government, made him a target.
In the U.S., Yarst – now based in Miami – first flew to New York and stayed at a hostel for a month, choosing to start his life over in a new country. Human rights organizations heard about his case and contacted him, connecting him with a lawyer and to resources from the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations. He received asylum in 2017, and he found employment at Voice of America.
'VOA was the one service who could hire people like me,' he said.
He feels not betrayed but disappointed by the government. President Donald Trump, 'during his campaign, he talked a lot about the swamp, about corrupt people,' Yarst said. 'But these are not corrupt people who are out on the street.'
When Fatima Tlis arrived in America, she resettled in Erie, Pennsylvania, through the work of the International Institute of Erie, now the Erie field office of the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. It helped her learn English, get a Social Security card and establish credit. She couldn't get a car, so she and her two children would ride bicycles through the rural roads of northeast Pennsylvania to Walmart for groceries, which they loaded into backpacks. 'Of course, in Pennsylvania, nobody cares that you're some kind of a famous journalist,' she told The Post.
When she found out her fellowship application to Harvard University's Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights had been accepted, she broke down sobbing.
Before that, in Russia, Tlis reported for both independent Russian media and the U.S.-based Associated Press, particularly about issues in the Caucasus. She said Russian security forces harassed her, detained her, tortured her and once put her in a hidden room in a police station that she called a 'cage.' It was 12 feet long, but only four feet wide, and had a door with thick iron bars, through which she could see a portrait of Putin on the wall.
After that, a former classmate who worked for the Russian security forces, stopped her on the street one day and warned her that her name was on a list and urged her to flee the country. 'What list?' Tlis replied.
'You remember your friend Anna Politkovskaya?' she recalls him asking. 'She was on the same list – and those lists never expire.'
Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights activist critical of Putin, was assassinated in 2006.
Tlis joined Voice of America in 2010 after two years of fellowships at Harvard, including the prestigious Nieman Fellowship. At the time of Trump's executive order in March dismantling the USAGM, she was the supervisory editor in charge of Polygraph and the team's only full-time employee. The others worked full time but were designated as personal services contractors, who are easier to hire and fire. As of now, she still has a job.
Lake sent her plans for a reduction in force at the USAGM to Congress on June 3, a move that would eliminate all but 80 staffers at the agency and fewer than 20 at Voice of America. About 1,300 people worked at VOA before the March executive order. Tlis said that – beyond Polygraph – she personally knows of more than a dozen asylum holders or seekers at Voice of America. Lake did not respond to a request for comment about the asylum holders that have or could be fired.
'The people who were working on my team, journalists who, because of their job, endured the impossible just to be able to support the truth in their countries,' Tlis said. 'Still, after all of that they remained true to their profession, to their mission, and wanted to continue fighting lies and falsehoods and unmasking disinformation. Those people are getting fired right now.'