JX Fund – European Fund for Journalism in Exile

In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts.

YouTube remains the only major US-based social media platform available in Russia. It’s become “indispensable” to everyday people, making a ban tricky. Journalists and dissidents are taking advantage.

“I consider this label repressive. But I can say for sure that we will continue to work, whatever they call us,” says Daria Poryadina, editor of the exile-Russian news outlet SOTA, that got declared an ‘undesirable organization’ by Russia’s Prosecutor General on May 16.

A Moscow Court has registered a misdemeanor case accusing Meduza co-founder Galina Timchenko of participating in an “undesirable organization,” Mediazona reported on May 27, citing online records.

Podcast radios are becoming a new media niche in the Russian media landscape challenged by war-reinforced oppression. The Fix talked with Maksim Kurnikov, the head of Ekho Online, which was the first in the Russian media landscape to launch such a service, and Polina Filippova, the producer of podcasts of Radio Sakharov, which has been operating for a year.

The Afghanistan Journalists Support Organization (AJSO) has published its findings from a survey in which 310 Afghan journalists, both in Afghanistan and in exile, participated. The new report mainly focuses on the needs of journalists in capacity building.

Reporters Without Borders has ranked Belarus as the worst country for press freedom in Europe. Maria Savushkina, a Belarusian journalist currently living in Berlin, reaches tens of thousands of people back home with her political satire.

The Taliban claim that there is freedom of the press in the country. Even Western Youtubers are allowed to come – if they report positively and adhere to strict conditions.

The Etilaat Roz was once the most widely circulated newspaper in Kabul, but everything changed in August 2021 when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. In this unique video diary, journalist Abbas Rezaie follows the tenacious correspondents as they continue to report the news.

When Russia imposed harsh laws on reporters covering its invasion of Ukraine, dozens fled. But physical distance doesn’t always keep exiled journalists safe. The American journalist Liam Scott met some of them in Berlin. Watch his full video report on security for Russian journalists in exile here.

The International Press Institute has urged Poland’s Foreign Ministry to reconsider its decision to cut the financing of Belsat, a flagship Belarusian-language broadcaster operating within Poland’s public television service (TVP), amid growing concern about the survival of exiled Belarusian media. With the budget slashed, Belsat is not alone in being in a precarious state.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is alarmed by a worrying increase in the restrictions imposed on journalists, with authoritarian directives on women journalists’ dress, restrictions on women’s access to the audiovisual media and a ban on filming or photographing Taliban officials.

In the first two months of 2024, the Russian parliament has approved new laws ramping up pressure on journalists and public figures critical of the war on Ukraine. The new laws were adopted two years after the enactment of wartime censorship in Russia, which forced many independent journalists to flee.

Zahra Nader ist the founder and editor-in-chief of the Afghan Magazine Zan Times. For the Institute of War & Peace Reporting she reflects on her mission and shares what helps her to keep fighting for equality and justice in Afghanistan.

Nadio Momand was a journalist and a law student in Afghanistan. But with the Taliban back in power, she has left her home and her dreams behind.

The journalism landscape in Afghanistan has undergone a significant and distressing transformation following the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021.

Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, unanimously approved a bill banning advertising on publications by “foreign agents”, a designation authorities have given to anti-Kremlin politicians, activists and media.