Oleg Roldugin enters Day Twelve of pretrial detention at Petrovka 38 in central Moscow on Tuesday. [1] The custody window set by the Tverskoy District Court on April 10 expires May 10 — twenty days out. [2] The paper's Sunday account of Day Ten and the continued Western silence named the gap; two days later the gap has widened. No Anglophone broadsheet has filed on the formal April 14 charge of "illegal access to computer information" as part of a group. The Committee to Protect Journalists' April 9 demand for Roldugin's release has not been echoed by a new Western government statement in twelve days. [3]

The facts, as they stand Tuesday morning in Moscow, are these. Roldugin was detained at his apartment on April 9 before a thirteen-hour raid on Novaya Gazeta's newsroom that ended near 1 a.m. local time. [4] Moscow's Tverskoy District Court remanded him into pretrial detention until May 10 on April 10, under Part 3 of Article 272.1 — illegal use of personal data by a group, punishable by up to six years. On April 14 the investigation upgraded him from suspect to defendant and filed the formal charge. His lawyer Marina Andreeva's motion for house arrest was denied. He has pleaded not guilty. Security officers seized his laptop, hard drives, and press credentials, and reviewed his Telegram correspondence including exchanges with bots. [2]

What the West still is not covering is the catalogue of investigations Roldugin was running before the arrest. Novaya Gazeta published his February 21 piece on how a former aide to Ramzan Kadyrov's nephew acquired one of Russia's most expensive Moscow penthouses. [5] He had also reported on Putin's personal bunker complex in the Urals, and on corruption within the circle of former President Dmitry Medvedev. [1] The Insider, Meduza, and Mediazona have all flagged the March 10 opening date of the criminal case — eleven days before Roldugin's Kadyrov-aide piece ran. The timing is Novaya Gazeta's claim and the Russian independent press's frame. It is not a claim anyone in the English-language broadsheets has picked up.

The prosecutorial calendar now has shape. If investigators seek an extension past May 10, the motion must go to the Tverskoy court before the window expires. Russian Code of Criminal Procedure Article 109 permits extensions in two-month increments, to a general cap of twelve months. The April 9 CPJ statement by Chief Programs Officer Carlos Martínez de la Serna called the raid and detention "the latest escalation in years of pressure" on Novaya Gazeta. [3] No European foreign ministry has, as of Tuesday, made a named intervention. No American.

The paper's Moscow position from Day Ten holds at Day Twelve. Silence in one capital's press does not reduce the risk profile for the journalist in another capital's cell. Twenty days separate Roldugin from a courtroom. Eight days separate his formal charge from the first Western broadsheet account that has not yet come.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow