Boris Johnson blasts Putin saying his crackdown on the free press is making Russia poorer
Speaking in Moscow, Boris said free societies are more likely to be wealthy
BORIS JOHNSON today told Vladimir Putin his brutal media clampdown is making Russia poorer.
The Foreign Secretary slammed the Kremlin boss for presiding over “a society where journalists are shot because they investigate the business doings of the rich and powerful”.
In a speech to Moscow students, he also lambasted the Russian government for failing to respect the rights of gay people.
There are “economic benefits of freedom of expression”, Boris declared.
He argued: “The more tolerant a society is, the more supportive of free speech it is, the more likely that society is to be rich and successful.
"It is no accident that if you look at the global prosperity index, and then you look at the societies where journalists are free and well treated, you will see that the most prosperous societies are the ones where freedom of speech is most cherished."
Boris added: “I look back at that time in the 1990s, when in my conversations with Russian journalists and politicians we seemed to share the same ideals of freedom.
“I hope that moment of convergence will seem not to have been a fluke, not an illusion, not a mirage or a false dawn. I hope that time will come again.”
To hammer home his point, Boris met LGBT campaigners after delivering his civil liberties appeal at Plekhanov University in Moscow.
He told them: “We celebrate people’s freedom of choice, including whom to love”.
Since 1992, 1,271 journalists have been killed in Russia. – with 817 of them murdered.
One newspaper alone - Novaya Gazeta, which is bitterly critical of the Kremlin – has seen six of ist staff killed in the last 10 years.
Boris also laid red roses at a shrine to assassinated opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, on the spot he was gunned down on a Moscow bridge two years.
Boris was also asked by students what the most outrageous thing he did at university was.
The Foreign Secretary admitted: "I did do some terrible things in my student years, that it would not be right to recall because I have an excellent press pack with me".
And he told them he made the move from being a newspaper man into being a politician because “to adapt Clausewitz, politics is the continuation of journalism by other means”.
He also recalled to them his trip to Soviet Moscow in the 1980s when he flogged Levi's jeans on the street as a 16-year-old school boy.