“Pro-Russian” German Journalist De-Banked

The Moscow-based German journalist Ulrich Heyden, who has been covering Russian affairs for a wide variety of German media for over three decades, recently learned that his German bank, the Hamburger Sparkasse, is cancelling his bank account, apparently for reasons relating to the EU’s Russia sanctions. According to Heyden, writing on his Telegram channel, this is what he was told by a bank employee with whom he spoke by telephone, although the written cancellation notice he received merely refers to the bank “reviewing … its business relationships with clients who have their residence in Russia.” Heyden notes that he lives exclusively from the fees of German, Swiss, and Austrian media that are paid into his German account.

Two other German journalists who live in Russia, Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, were placed on the EU sanctions list last May, resulting in the freezing of their EU-based bank accounts. The EU accuses Lipp and Röper of spreading pro-Russian “war propaganda” and “misinformation.” Heyden, however, does not figure on the sanctions list.

Moreover, unlike Lipp and Röper, whom the EU describes as mere “bloggers,” Heyden is—or, at any rate, was—very much a mainstream journalist. As he notes in the open letter to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that he published on his Telegram channel, he was for ten years a contributor to the German public radio Deutschlandfunk, for thirteen years the Moscow correspondent of the daily paper the Sächsische Zeitung, and for no less than thirty years a contributor to the center-left intellectual weekly Freitag. He has also written for such likewise thoroughly mainstream venues as the Tagesspiegel, the Rheinische Merkur, and the German edition of the Financial Times.

Like Lipp and Röper, however, Heyden has tried in recent years, now writing mostly for alternative online outlets, to provide a more balanced view of the Ukraine conflict and to report on Russia, as he puts it, “with understanding and not foaming at the mouth.”  Showing any understanding of the Russian side of the conflict would appear to be controversial in the German public discussion nowadays. “Putinversteher”—literally, someone who understands Putin—is an actual slur that is commonly used in the discussion. 

As recounted in a memoir for the alternative German media NachDenkSeiten, Heyden was an eyewitness to the start of the war in the secessionist republic of Donetsk in May 2014, long before the 2022 Russian military intervention. It is virtually taboo even just to mention this prehistory nowadays. As it so happens, Heyden has authored a book on this prior civil war titled The Longest War in Europe Since 1945. He also, incidentally, is co-author of a 2008 volume on Opposition to the Putin System: Power and Resistance in Modern Russia.

In an interview with NachDenkSeiten, Heyden has noted that numerous reporters for major, mainstream German media are also based in Moscow, and he wonders whether they, too, have had their accounts cancelled, thus also threatening their livelihoods. In his open letter to President Steinmeier, he writes,

I will be 72 this year. What shall I say to my great-uncle Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld when I meet him in heaven? He was murdered, strangled with a wire around his neck, in Berlin-Plötzensee in September 1944 as a member of the resistance against the Hitler regime. I bear my first name in his honour. What will my great-uncle say? He will say that there was also murder and terror against dissidents in the Nazi era, and that he could not have imagined that such a thing would happen again in Germany. 

In an update on his Telegram channel, Heyden adds that the bank employee with whom he spoke said that the initiative for the closing of his account came in fact from Germany’s financial oversight authority, the BaFin. The BaFin, Heyden notes, itself falls under the authority of the German Ministry of Finance, which is headed by Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil.