JX Fund – European Fund for Journalism in Exile

TV Rain’s editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko talks about stereotypes surrounding Russian journalists in exile and what marks them different from their colleagues in the Baltic states and Ukraine.

Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court arrested in absentia TV Rain journalist and former IStories employee Ekaterina Fomina and IStories’ editor-in-chief Roman Anin. The journalists are accused of spreading so-called “fakes” about the Russian army with the motive of political hatred.

Russian exiled media and activists held a telethon  in support of the growing number of political prisoners inside Russia, raising tens of thousands of euros for those currently held behind bars.

Valera Ilinov, the founder of the leading independent media outlet covering the republic of Komi, sees his work as inherently political and decolonial. Last month, the 24-year-old founder of Komi’s flagship independent news outlet Komi Daily was fined for violating Russia’s censorship laws twice in one week.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In an interview with Le Monde, the Russian exiled journalist and opponent of the Putin regime talks about her work in Ukraine documenting the abuses committed by Russian forces and her hopes for the future of her country

With 29 journalists currently imprisoned, and 280 journalists and media organisations proclaimed “foreign agents”, Russia sits almost at the bottom of the Press Freedom Index. Even for those in exile, the danger remains.

The death of Aleksei A. Navalny in a Russian prison has been a blow to an opposition movement in which he was the figurehead. But it has also raised hopes of a united front against President Vladimir V. Putin.

Publications like The Insider are caught between state censorship and hostile platform dynamics.

In exile, once-profitable independent Russian media outlets have been severed from what had been their main base of subscribers and advertisers, who are forbidden from supporting them. Their business models are no longer viable.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, there have been numerous scandals related to the surveillance of Russians abroad by Moscow’s intelligence services and alleged Russian spies working in foreign countries.