The Russian journalist Elena Milashina, who broke the news of a campaign of repression being carried out against gay men in Chechnya. PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP PHOTO / GETTY

This spring, news of a campaign of repression against gay men in Chechnya, a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, began to appear in the United States and Europe. Dozens of men suspected of being gay were reportedly being held in secret prisons; many had been tortured, and several had died. Fifty members of Congress signed a letter calling on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to raise the issue of violence against gay men with Russian officials. The State Department released a statement saying that it was “increasingly concerned” about the situation and that it “categorically” condemned the “persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation,” but to date neither Tillerson nor Donald Trump has spoken publicly about the issue. Other foreign leaders have not been so circumspect. Last month, in a meeting in Moscow, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to exert his influence to “insure that minorities’ rights are protected.” On May 29th, at a testy joint press conference in Paris, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, challenged Putin on the need to protect Chechnya’s gay community, saying, “I will be constantly vigilant on these issues.”

In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has fought two wars against Moscow’s rule, which have left tens of thousands dead and the republic in ruins. Islamist-inspired terrorism, and a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that emerged in response, have left the population deeply traumatized. Today, Chechnya has been rebuilt, and the Kremlin enjoys a nominal peace—but not without a cost. In exchange for professing loyalty to Putin and keeping Chechnya nominally part of Russia, its forty-year-old leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, is allowed to rule the republic as his own private fiefdom.

The original reporting on the arrest, torture, and murder of gay men in Chechnya was published in April, in Novaya Gazeta, an independent and muckraking Russian newspaper. Over the years, six of the paper’s journalists have been murdered, including, in 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, whose dispatches from Chechnya in the late nineties and early aughts made for uncomfortable but essential reading. Since Politkovskaya’s death, much of the paper’s coverage of Chechnya has been done by Elena Milashina, a thirty-nine-year-old reporter who has numerous confidential sources inside the republic, and who is no stranger to threats for her work. She is the recipient of numerous prizes, including, in 2013, an International Women of Courage Award, presented by the U.S. State Department. Milashina was the primary reporter at Novaya Gazeta who broke the story of Chechnya’s anti-gay campaign. Shortly after her articles on the subject appeared—sparking coverage in the West and an uproar among readers, activists, and politicians in the United States and Europe—Milashina, fearing for her safety, left Russia temporarily. The New Yorker spoke to her recently about her reporting, the situation for gay men in Chechnya, and the global outcry in response to her work.

Given the extraordinary difficulty in reporting on the ground in Chechnya, how do you generally go about collecting and publishing information on what is happening there?

People have become terribly afraid to talk, because as soon as you show up—even if they refuse to speak with you—they will have problems. These days, I travel to Chechnya with an absolutely clean phone. I have several contacts memorized in my head, including numbers for some very serious people in the Russian Presidential Administration, so, in case anyone suddenly detains me, I can remember a number or two and try and transmit a message to Moscow, and ultimately to my editors.

I usually invite the people I need to interview to come to someplace outside of Chechnya. They will not talk in Chechnya; they simply are too afraid. The local authorities can do anything with the people you contact. You cannot protect them. One way around this is that I have a huge network of informants, who can send me information by phone or text, and which I then check with other people from my source list. I’ve found these people trust me for one simple reason: I do not release or publish much of the information that I obtain. When I sense that a piece of information is dangerous for him or her personally, I tell them, “You will be figured out, you are the only source, you heard it in person.” And so I cannot use it. Over time, these people understand that I am concerned not only with information but with security of my sources, and this creates trust.

How did you first hear of the anti-gay campaign?

In mid-March, one of the few local local human-rights activists in Chechnya informed me that a certain person had been detained and killed because he was gay. As is my usual practice, I began to check this information. It turned out this man had been detained, effectively tortured to death, and, indeed, the motive was his sexual orientation. But he was not the only one, I found out. There were others. And they had all been tortured, so that they would give up the names and contacts of other gay men, who were then themselves detained, and the cycle spread from there. It became clear very quickly that this was a purposeful campaign against gays.

What were the attitudes toward homosexuality inside Chechnya before this campaign of repression?

Male homosexuality was always perceived very badly in Chechnya. Even gay men themselves considered themselves sick, damned, inferior. Very many of these men have families and children, and are trying to cope with the situation somehow. They understand that, deep down, their status is not acceptable in their society. If they were found out, families would choose to close their eyes to this fact—having a male relative who was known to be gay would be too great a shame for the family, or even the whole clan, which can run to hundreds of people. Chechen families are very sensitive to their image and how their extended clans are perceived.

Honor killings against women—that is, women who, in the opinion of their relatives, somehow disgraced the family or their clan—are, sadly, rather common. Before this current campaign, we did not have a record of such honor killings targeting men in Chechnya. If a man was found out to be gay, he was not killed, but very often Chechen security forces would use it as an excuse for blackmail. The taboo was a pretext for extortion. But there were never killings, let alone on a mass scale. This became possible only after the signal passed from above, from the Chechen authorities.

You have said that families killed their own relatives because they were suspected of being gay?

We know of six cases in which families were told by the authorities to kill male relatives who were said to be gay. Of those, at least three, maybe four, such killings actually took place. And this is a big problem, because in this way the authorities make people complicit in their crimes. From the very beginning, when we realized this was a campaign against gays, we knew it would be very difficult, that no relatives would want to confirm anything to us. For many Chechen families, the accusation of homosexuality is much more terrible than the charge of supporting terrorism. That accusation—sympathy for terrorists, involvement in extremism, having ties to Wahhabi cells or even ISIS—is a familiar one. It is, in a way, routine. It is considered a kind of norm. But the charge of homosexuality is very serious. No relatives will want to confirm this, because, first, it is a shame for the family and, second, in many cases the authorities force them to kill their relatives who are suspected of being gay. And family members who have committed an honor killing will not want to talk about it. They don’t want to testify against themselves or implicate their family further.