Executive Summary

• Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has sharply raised the cost of both producing and consuming independent journalism in Russia, through criminalization of war reporting, blocking of online platforms, and tightening of restrictions on circumvention tools.
• Russian independent media outlets have consequently moved into exile, creating a diverse ecosystem that comprises, according to our estimates, over 100 projects across six functional categories.
• While the aggregate website traffic of Russian independent media has fallen by three to four times against the pre-2022 baseline, their traffic on the social media platforms Telegram and YouTube has grown by four to six times. Each major political event since 2022 has produced traffic surges, leading to the expansion and consolidation of the independent media’s audience. The Kremlin’s belated blockings of Telegram and YouTube allowed independent news outlets to entrench themselves before major restrictions were introduced.
• Independent media have three types of audience in Russia: a core of habitual users, an incidental audience, and crisis-driven news consumers. This report estimates the total number of monthly unique and deduplicated Russian users to be at the level of 6–8m for the core, and 17–25m in total, inclusive of the incidental and crisis-driven audiences.
• Independent media have established themselves as significant players in the Russian information space. Throughout 2025, they accounted for 18–20% of original news sources in online reporting, demonstrating the capacity to serve as a robust alternative to state media, and to shape international coverage of issues that the Kremlin has tried hard to dominate.
• The impact of Russian independent media goes beyond numbers and the delivery of uncensored information. For their in-country audiences, these media projects serve as a form of epistemic anchoring, sustaining a coherent picture of reality and a sense of belonging for a wider community of like-minded people.
• Despite such achievements, Russian independent media now face compounding pressures: increased news avoidance, the international donor funding crisis, and an accelerated drain on talent. Sustaining the independent media ecosystem will require more than funding alone. Democratic governments should treat independent Russian media projects as a strategic asset—a source of expertise on Russia and an underused resource for countering the Kremlin’s influence within Russian-speaking diaspora populations. 

Introduction

Information control is always a top priority for authoritarian regimes, and Russia is no exception. Since Vladimir Putin’s rise to the presidency, the Kremlin has used every pretext to tighten the screws on independent journalism, including during the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, the hostage crisis at a Moscow theater in 2002, and the subsequent hostage crisis at a school in Beslan in 2004. Any outlets that offered honest reporting consistently suffered reprisals, leading to a gradual dismantling of the space for independent journalism that had emerged in the 1990s.¹

Over the past four years, however, Russian independent media have operated under conditions that are dramatically harsher than those of the previous two decades. With the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin imposed wartime censorship and effectively criminalized independent journalism, primarily through the introduction of heavy penalties for spreading “fake information” about the conflict and for the so-called “discreditation” of the Russian armed forces.² Independent outlets that had endured numerous earlier crackdowns, such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, and TV Rain, were forced to suspend operations within the country.³ Russia’s standing in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index fell from 150th in 2021 to 172nd in 2026, out of 180 countries in total.⁴

What followed was a massive relocation of independent media, with some 1,500 journalists leaving the country.⁵ A steady outflow of media professionals from Russia between 2012 and 2022 had already generated functioning models of journalism in exile, including the professional networks, infrastructure, and institutional know-how needed to absorb a much larger exodus.

By 2026, Russian exiled media had evolved into a well-developed ecosystem, producing journalism that matters to millions of people. Their achievement has come against formidable odds, as independent outlets confront an authoritarian machinery that has worked for years to extinguish alternative voices. The media organizations in this community continue to innovate in order to preserve its ethos of independent journalism and the free flow of information.

The present report examines what has happened to Russian independent media projects since the termination of their work in Russia and the start of their operations in exile. It is one of three reports in a series mapping the resilience and continued impact of Russia’s democratic civil society.

The report defines Russian independent media projects as a media ecosystem rather than a sector, as they range from legacy outlets and channels with formal editorial standards to much smaller teams or individuals operating primarily on YouTube and Telegram. The report draws on 32 interviews with media managers and journalists representing 23 different projects, conducted in 2025–26, and 15 interviews with institutional donors supporting their work. We supplemented this information with the analysis of traffic data covering the period 2021–26, which were partially validated with internal data that 11 media projects privately shared with us.

The report traces how independent media have adapted to new operating conditions inside and outside Russia, documents the scale and texture of the impact that they still generate among their audiences in the country, and examines the constraints that have threatened their position, including the 2025 funding crisis associated with the reorientation of US foreign aid.

We argue that Russian independent media projects are not merely beneficiaries of support from democratic countries. They are a strategic asset in the struggle against the Russian dictatorship and its influence abroad. We also argue that in an era of technological breakthroughs in both media innovation and authoritarian censorship and disinformation, these media projects represent a test case for how free voices opposing authoritarianism worldwide can be technologically and institutionally reinforced.

The Costs of Producing and Consuming Independent Media Under Wartime Conditions

Independent journalists are among the most heavily repressed segments of Russian society, second only to opposition politicians.⁶ The reason is structural. Independent reporting exposes abuse of power, corruption, injustice, and the arbitrariness of policymaking, raising the political costs of authoritarian misrule. This makes an independent journalist the autocrat’s natural adversary.⁷ Over the last 25 years, the Kremlin has steadily increased the risks associated with the profession by expanding its repertoire of repressive instruments. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the independent media have suffered disproportionately from the broader crackdown on dissent.

Data from OVD-Info and the Mass Media Defence Centre (see Figure 1) show that journalists and media figures have been the most common targets of “foreign agent” designations, administrative cases brought under discriminatory laws, and criminal prosecutions in “undesirable organizations” cases.⁸ Criminal charges for dissemination of “fake information” were routinely brought against journalists and editors of independent outlets following their reporting on Russian military atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022.⁹ Even in exile, Russian journalists continue to face transnational repression, including criminal convictions in absentia, intimidation of relatives, and surveillance or harassment in their country of residence.¹⁰

By April 2026, according to RSF, at least 48 journalists were imprisoned in Russia, accounting for roughly 10% of all jailed journalists worldwide.¹¹ The figure included Russian nationals as well as captured Ukrainian journalists and staff of foreign outlets. The 2024 death in Russian custody of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna led to targeted EU (European Union) sanctions against those responsible.¹²

The Kremlin’s repressive strategy targets not only the journalists and outlets themselves, but also the audience’s ability to reach them. The aim is to raise the cost—in terms of time, effort, and potential punishment—of access to uncensored reporting.

Before 2022, the principal state regulator in this domain, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and the Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), blocked 30,000–60,000 websites annually, the bulk of which were accused of hosting pirated material, drug-related content, and similar categories.¹³ The number of blocked media outlets in the same period remained very limited, with a small spike in 2014.¹⁴ At the time, the Kremlin’s preferred way of dealing with politically irritating outlets had been to apply pressure through their owners. This was the case with the dismissal of Galina Timchenko as editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru in 2014.¹⁵ Dozens of journalists left the outlet to join Timchenko in creating the exiled outlet Meduza. A similar story unfolded at RBC in 2016, with Elizaveta Osetinskaya leaving the Russia-based outlet and later founding the independent online newspaper The Bell.¹⁶ Meanwhile, many other media in the country, run by independent and semi-independent editorial teams, remained unblocked.

The full-scale invasion changed this pattern. Roskomnadzor’s grounds for applying restrictions expanded considerably; any media outlet covering the war and citing sources other than official ones, such as the Ministry of Defense, became subject to blocking.¹⁷ By the end of 2022, 9,300 internet resources were restricted on this basis alone.¹⁸ The list included every major prewar Russian independent outlet as well as the new media projects launched by journalists in exile. In some cases, only a few days passed between a new outlet’s launch and its blocking.¹⁹ Moreover, the grounds for blocking kept expanding. In 2025, the government restricted access to 1.3m internet resources, with most targeted content related to circumvention tools and “LGBT propaganda,” which had been designated as “extremist” in Russia.²⁰ 

By the second quarter of 2026, the Kremlin had also blocked every major social media platform through which independent journalistic projects could reach Russian audiences. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter were banned in the opening weeks of the war; bans on WhatsApp, YouTube, and Telegram followed in the subsequent years (see Figure 2).²¹ To further incentivize user migration away from these platforms, the Kremlin applies indirect pressure on content creators, imposes fines for advertising, and requires bloggers to enroll in a state registry, among other tactics.²²

Simultaneously, the Kremlin has rolled out fully controlled alternatives. The Max messaging application is marketed as a replacement for Telegram and a Russian equivalent of China’s WeChat, while VK Video is presented as the domestic substitute for YouTube. Despite aggressive state promotion of these platforms, the data tell a sobering story.²³ As of April 2026, the monthly reach of the formally blocked Telegram stood at 72.8m, compared with Max’s 80.6m.²⁴ YouTube, after being banned for 1.5 years, trailed VK Video by only 17m monthly users (65.9m versus 82.9m).²⁵

The content of blocked international platforms and media projects remains partially accessible inside Russia through virtual private networks (VPNs) and other circumvention tools. In 2020–21, the top 50 VPN applications were downloaded 5–6m times annually in Russia; that figure soared to 63m in 2022 before settling at 15–20m in 2024–25, with a sharp spike in March 2026 caused by the government’s attempt to block Telegram.²⁶

The Kremlin has moved to close this gap in its censorship apparatus. In early 2026, roughly 450 VPN services were blocked in Russia, along with the main VPN protocols.²⁷ Even so, both survey data and independent modeling based on search-query patterns suggest that by the second quarter of 2026, 35–40% of Russians, or 50–55m people, were using VPNs at least episodically.²⁸ This most recent growth in the use of VPNs reflects the technology’s deeper societal penetration. It now reaches older age cohorts and social groups that are traditionally understood as dependent on the state, such as public-sector employees.²⁹ The trend is likely due in part to schoolteachers’ pushback against the imposed use of Max as a workplace messaging app.³⁰

It is worth noting that Roskomnadzor’s technical capabilities have grown markedly more sophisticated, increasing the burden on Russian users seeking access to blocked content.³¹ For example, in April 2026, the regulator ordered the 30 most-used Russian apps (including online banking platforms and mobile service providers) to detect VPN usage and suspend service for individuals found to be using the banned technology.³² To ensure reliable access, a person inside Russia now typically needs to have several VPNs running on different protocols, in addition to a dedicated circumvention device that is kept apart from the one used for ordinary Russian apps.³³

Taken together, these technological barriers and pressure on users, including through prosecutions for reposts of content on social media and some initial attempts to criminalize the mere consumption of independent media, have set a high price on access to such outlets from inside Russia.³⁴ Several media representatives interviewed for this research stressed that their content-delivery strategy derives from the assumption that people in Russia “have to have a plan for accessing alternative information.” Rather than an incidental, ambient form of consumption, it must be a deliberate practice carried out according to the user’s own rules.

These conditions have reshaped what media initiatives can realistically hope to accomplish. They seek to maximize their impact among the committed core audience that does the work of reaching them. At the same time, they must invent formats that can attract the incidental reader wherever contact is possible.

The Independent Media Ecosystem and Its Impact

Despite the intensifying pressure since 2022, the current constellation of independent media projects constitutes a rich and varied media ecosystem, in which legacy editorial outlets coexist with the personal initiatives of journalists, bloggers, and public experts.³⁵

By our estimate, as of the second quarter of 2026, there were 131 active media projects covering current political events and each regularly drawing at least 100,000 monthly views.³⁶ (The views could be an aggregate number or the number on any one of the three major platforms we tracked, namely Telegram, YouTube, and the projects’ websites.)³⁷ This media ecosystem features two basic categories of outlets that are of roughly equal importance. The first consists of editorial projects, meaning outlets with established editorial roles, regular output, and an institutional identity. The second category consists of stand-alone projects organized around a single person or a single format, such as interviews or explainers (see Figure 3).

Editorial media fall within one of the following subcategories:

• General-interest media (e.g., TV Rain or Meduza)—the largest projects by editorial headcount, designed to serve a wide audience with diverse informational needs, typically maintaining a comprehensive, day-to-day news agenda
• Investigative media (e.g., iStories or Proekt)—smaller, mission-driven teams that specialize in original reporting aimed at uncovering hidden information, wrongdoing, or corruption
• Subject-focused outlets (e.g., The Bell or T-invariant)—projects covering a defined subject or theme, such as business and the economy, environmental issues, or the Russian higher education system, and catering to professional or topically engaged audiences rather than the general public
• Region-focused outlets (e.g., Govorit NeMoskva or Pepel Belgorod)—projects centered on a specific geographical location, either a group of Russian regions or one particular region 

This more conventional categorization is complemented by two further groupings that are defined by their primary delivery channel, which tends to shape the content itself:

• Telegram first (e.g., Astra or Agentstvo)—small or medium-sized newsrooms focused on rapid delivery of breaking news and exclusives, with the aim of sustaining a live, high-tempo Telegram feed
• YouTube first (e.g., vDud’ or The Breakfast Show)—projects whose center of gravity is YouTube, ranging from channels with regular television-format programs to simpler-format channels that require minimal technical skill or equipment and are built around an opinion leader or expert who offers running commentary on current political developments 

Together, these media projects function as an ecosystem rather than a scattered set of survivors. The ecosystem is based on information production, analysis, amplification, and dissemination among different segments of the overall audience.

For example, general-interest outlets keep a comprehensive daily news agenda alive and available in the Russian language. This creates a common context for news consumers in Russia and beyond. Investigative teams supply the original reporting that other outlets pick up, amplify, and translate for different audience segments. Subject-focused projects in turn offer deeper coverage in domains where general-interest media lack bandwidth or expertise, sustaining a layer of professional and analytical reporting that audiences rely on for nonpolitical contexts. Region-focused outlets complement the broader coverage with local stories, which the general-interest media typically miss, and serve as a connective tissue between exiled newsrooms and on-the-ground reporting from Russia. Telegram-first projects feed the rest of the ecosystem with breaking news and exclusives that larger outlets then verify, contextualize, and develop. YouTube-first channels translate this reporting into formats designed for engagement—long-form interviews, opinion-leader commentary, regular shows—and extend its reach to audiences that are less likely to consume text-based news.

The flow of information described here is not unique to Russian independent outlets. It is a normal media pattern in democracies. What makes the Russian case distinctive is that the ecosystem functions in exile and under extreme pressure. Unlike Russian human rights organizations, which operate largely in hybrid mode, with a presence on both sides of the border, the majority of media projects work primarily outside the home country.³⁸ They compensate for their limited ability to offer on-the-ground reporting by employing freelancers inside Russia and more advanced methods of remote cooperation with local informants.³⁹

Russian journalist and media expert Dmitry Kolezev argues that Russian independent media are “likely to constitute the largest media community in exile in history.”⁴⁰ The scale and diversity of this ecosystem keep it vibrant. Similar observations on the importance of a broader ecosystem to the survival of journalism in exile have been made in analyses of the Venezuelan and Syrian media diasporas.⁴¹

The defining impact of the independent media ecosystem is its ability to offer high-quality information about what is actually happening inside Russia, particularly in the subject areas that the Kremlin tries hard to obscure. Independent outlets regularly document the realities on the front lines of the Russian war in Ukraine and in the occupied territories, investigate war crimes, and report on the experiences and morale of ordinary Russian servicemen. They also write about political repression, targeted killings, the architecture of sanctions evasion, and much more. Much of this journalism is delivered live and through exclusive reporting, and each story chips away at the Kremlin’s official version of reality. As long as the state monopoly on information remains contested, there is an accessible factual basis for the more comprehensive work of challenging the authoritarian regime.

Independent media projects thus preserve the critical capacity to compete for agenda-setting power in the Russian information space. Data from The True Story, an independent news aggregator launched after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shows that in 2025 non-censored media projects consistently accounted for 18–20% of all original news sources in online media coverage of current affairs (see Figure 4).⁴² State-sponsored outlets supplied roughly 35–40% of original reporting, with the remainder drawn primarily from foreign media sources in non-Russian languages. This distribution applies only to the digital space, where competition with state media still exists.⁴³

The substantial contributions of independent media are all the more striking given the asymmetry of opportunities between such projects and Russian state media. The difference is not only that independent outlets are blocked, exposed to political repression, and cut off from the kinds of access state outlets take for granted (official comment, press pools, the possibility to speak safely with experts and eyewitnesses inside Russia), but also that the financial divide is just as stark. According to JX Fund, the combined 2024 budget of the 63 exiled media outlets in its sample, including their own revenues and donor support, was about $84m.⁴⁴ For comparison, just the direct spending on state media from the federal budget that year was 121bn rubles ($1.4bn).⁴⁵ Once advertising revenues and regional subsidies are added, the actual gap is significantly wider.

Independent outlets’ enduring presence in the news flow signals something more than their continued production of exclusive reporting from inside Russia. It indicates that independent media projects have occupied a defined niche within the Russian information environment. 

There are trade-offs involved in holding such a niche. Analysis from the Center for Data and Research on Russia (Cedar) suggests that most independent media content predictably concentrates on watchdog topics like repression and arrests, developments on the front line in Ukraine, or casualties and the consequences of missile and drone attacks on both sides.⁴⁶ The analysis indicates that the topical concentration prevails across the entire independent media ecosystem, whereas the state media cover a far broader range of topics and thereby meet the more varied informational needs of Russian society.

Experts and donors seem to agree that the independent media tend to work on the same set of topics, partially duplicating one another, and that this effectively confines them to a similarly narrow audience segment. However, the traffic analysis below tells a different story.

Quantifying the Traffic and Audiences of Russian Independent Media

Over the last few years, the independent media ecosystem has proven extremely adaptive. The initial shocks of 2022 pushed journalists to launch new outlets, relaunch old ones from exile, and double down on the platforms that remained accessible in the early years of the war, namely Telegram and YouTube. As a result of this shift, the aggregate monthly website traffic across all media projects had fallen by three to four times as of 2026 in comparison with the pre-2022 baseline.⁴⁷ However, their monthly traffic on Telegram and YouTube grew four- to sixfold during the same period (see Figure 5). 

An analysis of the curves between 2021 and 2026 shows that during acutely shocking news developments, traffic to independent media resources spikes, as audiences are jolted out of their habitual information routines and reach for alternatives to state propaganda.⁴⁸ The Russian military’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine drove independent media’s Telegram traffic to 12 times the prewar level; the traffic then settled at four to five times the prior level, showing that a portion of the surge audience stayed on. Subsequent shocks, such as the September 2022 mobilization order, the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary forces in June 2023, or imprisoned opposition leader Aleksey Navalny’s assassination in 2024, each produced their own peaks, allowing independent outlets to retain some of the audience it gained with each influx.

Through these successive waves of crisis-driven engagement, audiences accumulated and stabilized into a settled core for most independent media outlets, including those launched after the invasion. Figure 6 plots all projects across a Telegram-YouTube traffic map, with bubble size reflecting the combined audience across all three delivery channels—Telegram, YouTube, and projects’ websites. 

General-interest and investigative outlets anchor the ecosystem with a strong dual presence on Telegram and YouTube, complemented by sustained website traffic that distinguishes them from the rest. Subject- and region-focused projects form a “long tail” in the middle and lower bands of the chart: they are individually small, but collectively they cover dense thematic and territorial niches, providing the entry points for more specialized audiences. Telegram-first and YouTube-first projects, in turn, hug their respective axes, confirming that media projects hold two different audiences—one oriented toward fast text-based information and the other toward video stories. 

This diversity of modes and subjects plays a significant role. By the time the Kremlin started to block YouTube in 2024 and Telegram in 2026, independent media projects’ audiences had already consolidated after the shocks of the previous years and were prepared for further disruptions, in part because they had learned to use VPNs. As a result, current government restriction efforts are struggling to break down an entrenched user base rather than a new and fragile one. 

Users’ adaptation and outlets’ effective coverage of key events explains why independent media projects retain a substantial and unique audience in Russia.⁴⁹ Even more significantly, this audience is capable of engaging with independent content even under the existing restrictions.

Estimating the actual audience in Russia is always a technical challenge. Beyond the traffic data in Figures 5 and 6, one needs to isolate the traffic from outside Russia and differentiate between views and unique users, both across platforms (some users follow an outlet on Telegram, YouTube, and its website all at once; others stick to a single distribution channel) and across outlets (a single user may read Meduza and watch TV Rain in parallel).

We have developed a method to address the challenge, utilizing imperfect available data. The results should still be treated as approximate. To isolate traffic from Russia, we combined publicly available audience surveys with the projects’ own assessments and geographic data analytics, which they shared with us. To deduplicate the audience, we used JX Fund’s 2023 methodology with updates from the currently available data (see Appendix for details).⁵⁰

We then mapped these calculations onto three audience types that are most consistently identified by our respondents as targets of their media strategies.

• Core audience/habitual users: These are the most loyal in-Russia news consumers, in contact with one or several media projects anywhere from daily to a few times a month.⁵¹ Their consumption is deliberate and habitual, entailing visits to a site or YouTube channel as a matter of routine. Such users also absorb the costs of staying connected, for instance by employing VPNs, planning their access methods, and “hiding” the application icons for “undesirable” outlets.
• Extended reach/incidental users: These users engage in irregular, incidental contact, often sparked by a nonpolitical story that catches their eye.⁵² Once engaged, they either browse adjacent material or are served more independent media projects’ content through search aggregators (Google News, Discover, AI search) or platform recommendations.⁵³
• Crisis-driven users: This group turns to independent media only during major events, producing the traffic spikes visible in Figure 5 before drifting back to their habitual media diet.⁵⁴

Figure 7 shows the monthly unique in-Russia audience of our media projects sample, based on averaged data from January to March 2026. The core audience stands at 5.8–8.4m users per month; combined with the incidental audience, the total reaches 10–16m, and during extraordinary events the total audience can climb to the range of 17–25m.⁵⁵ These estimates are broadly consistent with earlier studies, public expert assessments, and nonpublic self-estimates shared by the media managers we interviewed.⁵⁶ However, the estimates rest on a number of assumptions and are best understood as indicative rather than precise.

The data above do not yet reflect the full impact of the Telegram ban imposed by the Kremlin in April 2026. Although Figure 5 shows a small spike in March, driven by several overlapping domestic crises that coincided with the Telegram blocking, preliminary estimates indicate that “editorial” projects on Telegram lost roughly 12–16% of their audience, a significantly smaller decline than that suffered by progovernment channels.⁵⁷

The experience of the YouTube block suggests that the effects of platform restrictions may unfold gradually rather than immediately. After an initial traffic decline following YouTube’s throttling in 2024, media audiences returned to slower growth in 2025–26, driven primarily by the platform’s Shorts format rather than long-form video. If Telegram follows a similar pattern, the longer-term effects of its ban will become clearer in late 2026.

Beyond the Numbers: The Social and Political Impact of Exiled Media in Russia

For each category of the audience in Russia—core, incidental, and crisis-driven users—the independent media projects do more than provide uncensored information. They perform additional functions that shape much of their actual impact on people across the country.

Core users

The outlets’ most important effects are concentrated on the core audience of regular users, people who either followed independent media before 2022 or continued engaging with them after major audience surges, and who generally align with the antiwar and democratic values to which these outlets give voice.

Most media representatives we spoke to suggested that their loyal in-Russia audience appreciates the opportunity to relate emotionally to the coverage.⁵⁸ Democratic and antiwar Russians inside the country live in a regime-controlled information environment that was built to make their views look marginal, deviant, or nonexistent. Independent media routinely offer their core audience the proof that this portrayal is false, and that other Russians see the same reality, ask the same questions, and reject the same official narratives. In other words, the outlets serve as a form of epistemic anchoring, helping individuals retain a coherent picture of the world when the system that surrounds them is engineered to dismantle it. Independent media also enable people to sustain and develop their democratic, antiregime political identities.

One quality that allows the independent media ecosystem to perform these functions is the regularity of its programs. Audiences develop a relationship with specific journalists or public figures from whom they expect to hear on a fixed cadence. This is why author-driven projects like Vladislav Gorin’s regular podcast on Meduza, the weekly round-up show with Mikhail Fishman on TV Rain, or Ekaterina Shulman’s Status podcast on Ekho Moskvy have become staples of the core audience’s media diet.⁵⁹

The media projects with operations in Russia enjoy a crucial amplifier to the impacts described above. Their visible presence in the country gives them a different kind of authority for the core audience in terms of emotional support and epistemic anchoring, whether through symbolic gestures at critical moments, as with Novaya Gazeta’s broadcast on the day of Aleksey Navalny’s funeral, or through routine signals of in-country location during regular reporting, as with Zhivoy Gvozd’s references to its Moscow studio.⁶⁰

Some outlets reinforce all of this by engaging in deliberate community-building efforts with their in-country audience.⁵⁸ The initiatives may include Telegram chats, closed channels for donors, or specific email subscriptions connected to, for example, the VPN affiliated with the outlet. Community-building activity is common not just among independent media, but also in the other two civil society sectors covered in this series of CEPA reports: human rights organizations and higher education initiatives.

Another important impact of Russian independent media is the preservation of a working public sphere, a classic function of political socialization. Independent media projects provide space for political reasoning, the formation of views, and the recognition of competing positions in a country whose political institutions no longer tolerate such processes. The survival of a genuine public sphere within the media ecosystem allows people in Russia to engage both with domestic issues—in the absence of free and fair elections—and with international issues that are not directly tied to Russia, such as the war between Israel and Hamas. As one outlet manager observed, independent media projects have come to function as an “alternative parliament” for Russia.

The diverse ecosystem of exiled media collectively covers the full scope of political positions that can no longer be represented in Russia, from the left-wing online magazine Doxa to the libertarian outlet SVTV.⁶¹ A strong core at the center of the political spectrum is supplemented by environmentalist, feminist, and Indigenous voices. News consumers encounter this pluralism, identify themselves within it, and sometimes see their positions tested in direct debate.

In rarer cases, independent media can make a direct impact on decision-making within the country, such as by drawing attention to injustices or local government failures and eliciting an official response. Despite the scale of repression from the Kremlin, this mechanism still occasionally works at the regional and municipal levels, where region-focused outlets can shift the calculus of local authorities. Subject-focused outlets sometimes play a similar role, acting almost as human rights organizations by trying to halt repression against a specific individual through coverage alone. According to two regional editors we interviewed, such cases produce a brief but powerful surge of shared agency among their audiences. The incidents provide confirmation that, even now, certain things inside Russia can be moved through public pressure.

Finally, a further impact stems from a shift in the perception of independent media’s basic mission. Audience members no longer perceive them merely as news publishers. As one media manager put it, independent outlets have become people’s “partner in survival.” The most consequential development in this direction is a trend in which the majority of editorial outlets and even some YouTube influencers have built out and disseminated in-house VPN networks that are secure and durable in the face of official blocking.⁶² Independent media have also expanded the nature of their content since 2022 to include, for example, instructions on how to prepare for blockings and shutdowns, behave during police searches, talk to family members who consume state propaganda, and withstand the constant pressure of an antidemocratic environment.⁶³

The types of impact described here are corroborated by indirect signals from the core audience itself. One of the largest general-interest media projects, Meduza, maintains a crowdfunding platform on which its in-Russia readers can leave messages asking supporters abroad to contribute on their behalf and often explaining why access to Meduza matters to them.⁶⁴ The dominant narratives in these testimonials skew strongly toward emotional themes. People who mention hope for a different Russian future, the sense of not being alone, and finding a corner of normalcy together account for almost 50% of all messages (see Figure 8).⁶⁵ A more analytical attitude toward media, stressing the desire to access alternative information, appears in a quarter of the messages. Even allowing for self-selection among those who choose to write such testimonials, the distribution underscores the idea that what independent media deliver is not primarily factual information, but an emotional climate and political framing in which factual information continues to matter.

Incidental users

The impact that independent media achieve with incidental users is smaller in magnitude than with the core audience, but reaching this layer of news consumers remains a sustained editorial priority. Our media-manager respondents identified two distinct subcategories within the incidental audience, each of which requires its own strategy.

The first subcategory consists of people whose views are not fully aligned with the outlets’ positions on the war in Ukraine or the political regime in Russia. These individuals typically have a skeptical or ambivalent attitude toward what happens in the world. The media projects’ mission with this group is to prevent the kind of disengagement that the Kremlin-controlled information environment is designed to produce: “looking away,” normalizing the war, treating it as a separate sphere unconnected to daily life.⁶⁶ Independent outlets seek to prevent this by attributing responsibility and drawing causal links that the state media work hard to obscure, for example by showing the interconnections among rising prices, interrupted internet access, disruptions in medication supplies, visa restrictions, and the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. When an incidental encounter with independent media content delivers that linkage, even briefly, it produces a more complete picture of reality than the state media can produce.

The second subcategory is different in character, consisting of people who avoid political content not out of ambivalence but as part of a conscious strategy of news avoidance, which, paradoxically, often aligns with the values espoused by independent media. For this audience, media projects attempt to offer something other than news: cultural coverage, history, parenting shows, podcasts, and long-form videos on themes that satisfy the need for a value-consonant kind of escapism. But because the media ecosystem’s functions are intertwined, with overlapping audiences, cross-references, and partner-project recommendations, habituating a user to one non-news format opens a path toward the news-oriented work of adjacent outlets. What begins as cultural or lifestyle consumption can, over time, become political consumption.

Crisis-driven users

Crisis-driven users are often skeptical of both independent media projects and state media in general, and do not necessarily share the core audience’s pro-democracy outlook. What draws them in is practical need: during events such as military mobilization, large-scale mutiny, or external military invasion, independent media provide timely, actionable information that is not available on state media.

The extra impact related to this audience derives from its recurring return to independent media during critical moments. Even episodic engagement means that Russian independent media projects remain part of people’s cognitive map of available information sources, preventing the Kremlin from fully closing the information landscape and creating a purely state-controlled space. As long as this latent media pluralism survives, citizens will know they have a place to turn for alternative information during any future rupture in the official narrative, whether it is caused by an economic crisis or political instability.⁶⁷

Mounting Pressures on Independent Media Projects 

The independent media projects’ adaptability, as described above, should not be overstated. In 2026, the sector is in a state of accumulated operational, financial, and emotional strain. Nearly every media manager and journalist we spoke to reported some version of burnout, exhaustion, or doubt about continuing the work at its current level of intensity. The pressures that produce this strain fall into three broad categories: (1) a worsening of the news avoidance problem; (2) financial precarity and talent drain, sharpened by the 2025 international donor crisis; and (3) a lack of responsiveness from the global technology companies on which they depend.

The most immediate constraint on independent media’s impact is the steady drift of audiences away from the types of reporting that they do best. In the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, a growing share of the audience in Russia, including the core and incidental users, started to actively avoid news that touched on the war, political repression, and deteriorating conditions in Russia. One media manager we interviewed captured this with a wry inversion: “instead of FOMO [fear of missing out] we are dealing with FOFO [fear of finding out].” The reality that independent media illuminate is objectively grim; individual users are largely powerless to change it, and engagement carries a real cost.

Media projects have responded with format experimentation, testing out lighter tones, more cultural and historical content, lifestyle subprojects, and the like. However, with rare exceptions, these efforts have not converted into audience growth, particularly for general-interest outlets whose subprojects in the non-news territory receive dozens of times less traffic than their main channels.⁶⁸ The drift is compounded by external forces. Roskomnadzor’s crackdown on circumvention tools can incentivize users who lost access to one VPN to disengage from “negative” exiled content altogether rather than seek out another. Another problem originates from the outlets’ relations with donors: grant funding and reporting requirements indirectly incentivize niche outlets to broaden their scope and expand into the domain of general news. As a result, there is now an oversupply in this area, with multiple outlets covering the same stories in similar ways, which can reinforce the audience’s sentiments behind general news avoidance. 

The 2025 donor crisis hit independent media initiatives especially hard. Previously US funding had accounted for up to 40% of their total annual budgets.⁶⁹ Having been cut off from both the Russian advertising market and a major external funding source, newsrooms spent 2025–26 experimenting with adjacent revenue streams: book delivery, merchandise, educational courses, and even information-technology consulting.⁷⁰ Aside from some stand-alone YouTube channels supported by monetization, no midsize or large media outlet covered more than 25–30% of its costs through earned income and audience donations combined.⁷¹ Beyond the limited returns, the alternative revenue-seeking activities carry a strategic cost by diverting attention from journalism itself. As one media manager explained: “it was not for the sake of opening shops or doing consultancy that we left Russia and are now criminally prosecuted.”

The cumulative effect is an accelerating talent drain that compounds two decades of Kremlin-driven degradation of the journalistic profession. Already in 2024, some journalists left the sector, including nonpublic staff who returned to Russia, due to burnout and financial pressure.⁷² Over the last year, 18 of the 23 projects whose representatives we interviewed had to lay off staff. More broadly, the sector is shifting from salaried newsrooms toward leaner editor-and-freelancer models, reducing the numbers of more secure permanent employees and shrinking capacity for long-form and investigative reporting.⁷³ With few new entrants joining independent journalism, and many talented young journalists in Russia instead entering the well-funded state media sector, this trend is unlikely to be reversed.⁷⁴

The third constraint on the independent media is the failure to build any working coordination with the global technology platforms that serve as vehicles for content distribution. Despite repeated efforts, Russian independent media projects have been unable to restore YouTube monetization for Russia-based viewers since it was canceled at the start of the full-scale invasion, or to persuade Google to recalibrate its search and Discover algorithms, which continue to demote sites blocked inside Russia regardless of the political character of the blocking.⁷⁵ YouTube and Google have taken some positive steps by removing major Russian propaganda channels from their platforms, and partly reducing the algorithmic surfacing of state-aligned narratives.⁷⁶ Yet major global technology platforms reportedly continue to act on Kremlin requests by pulling independent media apps and VPN clients from their app stores.⁷⁷ Appeals have come from the media sector, the Russian opposition, and European politicians, but they have not been sufficient to establish a stable channel of communication that goes beyond standard user-support tickets.⁷⁸

As a result, independent media and their Russian users are left on their own to face the regime’s machinery of restrictive regulation and the construction of an insulated Russian internet. This is an unequal contest, with the state commanding effectively unlimited administrative and technical resources. If the major global platforms were to afford even modest but sustained engagement with the independent media by creating clearer escalation channels, reversing automated penalties applied to blocked domains, and allowing for targeted exemptions in monetization policy, this would meaningfully tilt the asymmetry and support independent voices working against any authoritarian information regime, not only the Russian one.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In 2026, the Russian independent media sector presents a mixed picture. The Kremlin’s pressure on independent journalism stretches back more than two decades, and its full-scale war against Ukraine has turned an already harsh domestic environment into something far more brutal and unforgiving. The country’s most dedicated media professionals have risen to the challenge, building an information ecosystem in exile that remains diverse and influential despite ongoing authoritarian attacks. At the same time, accumulated infrastructural and human-resource constraints increasingly limit its long-term sustainability. For democratic governments and donors, the situation suggests not only that continued support is needed, but also that the model of support itself requires rethinking.

To that end, we propose the following approaches:

1. Adapt support to the diversity of the independent media ecosystem. 

• Support should be distributed across the full range of ecosystem categories—including general-interest, investigative, subject- and region-focused, Telegram-first, and YouTube-first projects—rather than concentrated on the most visible outlets. An efficient system for wider distribution would likely require closer coordination between institutional and project-based donors than currently exists. 
• Traffic metrics should remain an important benchmark, but they need to be interpreted in context. Media projects serve distinct audiences and pursue distinct goals. Smaller outlets often maintain a loyal readership, preserve expertise in specific fields, or are still able to exert influence on municipal decision-makers in Russia. Larger outlets, by contrast, not only support the core audience, but are also better positioned to capitalize on sharp traffic spikes during major domestic crises.
• Donors should support independent media–led training, mentorship, and short-term “boot camp” programs for aspiring journalists from Russia, whether they are held online or abroad. Without new pathways for those seeking to enter the profession, the independent media sector risks steadily losing younger talent to state media, which remains the only stable and legal career track inside the country.

2. Facilitate direct coordination between global tech companies and independent media.

• Democratic states should establish a stable, formalized consultation channel that includes the exiled media sector, donor coalitions, and major global technology platforms, whether this takes the form of a multistakeholder forum, an ombudsman institution, or some other comparable mechanism.
• Coordination among these stakeholders should also entail proactive technical support. The effort should prioritize tools that reduce the burden of censorship circumvention for users, such as built-in proxying, traffic obfuscation, and the integration of stronger encryption into platforms that people already use. The current model, in which access depends on multiple VPNs and separate devices, makes independent media significantly harder to reach from inside Russia.
• Whatever is built for the Russian case should be used as a template that can be applied to other repressive regimes. Tools, channels, and policy frameworks that are developed for Russian independent media projects should be designed from the outset for potential use by independent journalists contending with authoritarian information environments anywhere in the world.

3. Treat independent media projects as strategic assets for democratic states, not just as recipients of support. 

• Government institutions in democracies should engage more systematically with the reporting of Russian independent media projects, particularly in areas where the outlets retain strong informational advantages. Sanctions enforcement is one area where such engagement is already starting to take shape: investigations into evasion schemes published by independent media are increasingly picked up by relevant government agencies and turned into enforcement action, though this still happens reactively rather than through any institutionalized channel between editorial teams and regulators. Beyond improving the analytical basis for democracies’ policies toward Russia, deepening engagement with independent media would help sustain their role as an important source of expertise about developments inside the country.
• Independent media also have underused potential in working with Russian-speaking diasporas. In countries such as Germany or the Baltic states, pro-Kremlin narratives still circulate widely through Russian-language media networks. Expanding the presence of independent and democratic outlets among these audiences would require targeted financial and infrastructural support. Over time, such support could help reduce the Kremlin’s influence in diaspora populations that Moscow tries to exploit as part of its broader “shadow warfare” strategy.⁷⁹

The survival of Russian media in exile is important in its own right, but it is also a test for the larger question of whether the liberal democratic order can sustain independent voices operating under authoritarian pressure around the world. Democratic societies are already subjected to massive information manipulation campaigns by authoritarian actors. One way to contest these corrosive campaigns, which harm the security interests of democracies across and beyond the transatlantic community, is to provide critical exiled media initiatives with the support necessary to maintain their resilience, their capacity to innovate, and their ability to break through the information controls of regimes like the one in Russia. In the absence of such sustained support, the prospects for a more accountable and peaceful Russia will shrink, while the malign activities that the Kremlin projects into democratic societies continue apace.

If the Russian independent media ecosystem ultimately cannot endure the current harsh conditions, its demise would send a signal to journalists from China, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, and other semi-free and unfree countries that exile journalism has no long-term future, and the shared infrastructure of free expression that democracies depend on would become that much weaker.

Appendix: Methodology for Traffic Collection and Domestic Audience Estimation

The dataset on Russian independent media projects’ traffic indicators was built from a combination of publicly available platform metrics, third-party analytics, internally shared data, and previously published research. The sources and processing methods are described below, in line with the three analytical tasks the dataset was designed to support.

1. Aggregating main traffic indicators

• Websites: Traffic estimates for 52 projects’ websites were initially retrieved from the specialized third-party analytics service Similarweb for the period 2021–26. These estimates were cross-checked against verified Google Analytics data provided by 8 outlets, and further supplemented by monthly snapshots of verified data on selected outlets drawn from JX Fund reports for 2022–25. Using the websites for which both estimated and verified data were available, a correction model was developed to adjust the Similarweb estimates for the remaining sites on two key indicators: monthly views and monthly unique users.
• Telegram: For 119 projects’ Telegram channels, all basic traffic indicators were retrieved through the public Telegram API for the period 2021–26. Additional, calculative indicators (subscriber engagement, average post reach, etc.) were extracted via a specialized Telegram analytics service, TGStat.
• YouTube: For 88 projects’ YouTube channels, verified channel traffic data for the period from November 1, 2023, to March 31, 2026, were obtained from YouScore, an independent monitoring project that tracks Russian-language YouTube channels. To reconstruct traffic for the earlier period (2021–23), per-video views and publication dates were retrieved through the YouTube Data API, and monthly channel-level traffic estimates were collected from the third-party analytics service Social Blade. A model was then built on the basis of these inputs and the verified 2023–26 data to reconstruct monthly traffic for 2021–23. Reconstructed traffic dynamics were triangulated against the Telegram-channel or website traffic of the same projects, where available. For 6 projects’ channels that were not covered by YouScore, monthly traffic estimates were taken directly from Social Blade.

2. Estimating the share of the in-Russia audience

The in-Russia share of independent media projects’ audiences cannot be measured precisely, given platform blockings and widespread use of circumvention tools. We therefore triangulated four types of indicators.

• The closest-to-verified figures come from projects’ YouTube dashboards. Although YouTube is blocked and accessible only via VPN, by 2025 the platform appeared relatively effective at identifying Russian users through indirect signals (language, time zone, links to other Google services)—a task that the company is incentivized to perform, since both ad targeting and the cancellation of monetization for Russian audiences depend on it. Dashboard data from 9 projects show an in-Russia share of 40–60%, plus unexplained spikes in the Netherlands, Hong Kong, or New Zealand that outlets attribute to harder-to-classify VPN users; these outlier shares were folded into our estimates. By analogy, TGStat estimates the in-Russia audience share for media connected to its premium accounts by using indirect signals; such data were obtained from 4 projects.
• Twenty media projects shared their own in-Russia estimates of the audience across one or more platforms, along with their estimates of additional traffic via their circumvention tools (mirrors, proxy links, PDF versions).
• Some outlets have run public audience-geography surveys on their platforms.⁸⁰ We identified 18 such surveys in 2025–26 and used the resulting data, together with self-reported figures from outlets that were published in earlier third-party research.⁸¹
• Additional data are available from so-called “magic links”—URL-shortening services that independent media projects use as a circumvention tool. When outlets post such a link (primarily on Telegram), users in jurisdictions where the main domain is blocked are routed to a dedicated, unblocked domain; all other users reach the main one. The ratio between these two flows is a reasonably accurate proxy for general website-text consumption. The 45–70% range derived from 6 projects was applied to all other outlets with websites. 

Across these four sources we obtained a value on at least one platform for 28 projects from our sample. These served as anchors for a predictive regression model, calibrated on media type and the platform-level traffic volumes from Step 1, which we used to estimate the in-Russia audience share for each of the three platforms across every project in our sample. The model produced low, medium, and high estimates for each project, and these three scenarios were used in all subsequent calculations.

3. Estimating the unique deduplicated audience

The overall methodology for the estimation of the deduplicated in-Russia audience was built on the model proposed by JX Fund in its 2023 report.⁸² JX Fund treats exiled media reach as the sum of platform-level unique users, then strips out three layers of double counting: (1) same person on multiple devices visiting the same site (~12% duplication on outlets), (2) same person reading more than one exiled media outlet at once (cross-media factor of 1.1–1.6x on sites, 2.7x on YouTube, 6.7x on Telegram), and (3) same person following the same project on several platforms (Hootsuite-derived ~20% multiplatform overlap). Finally, JX Fund adds a single 10–20% multiplier for audiences arriving via TikTok, word-of-mouth, and other platforms not covered via initial calculations.

We keep this logic for our research across three platforms (websites, Telegram, YouTube), but apply it for our larger independent media projects sample (132 projects), for a more recent period of time (January to March 2026) and replace the single 10–20% additional reach multiplier with two explicit behavioral tiers: incidental and crisis-driven, alongside the JX Fund–style core habitual tier. We also recalibrate the JX Fund assumptions’ for deduplicating coefficients, wherever we can based on initial platform data, collected in Steps 1 and 2, as follows: 

• Telegram: Instead of using JX Fund’s base as total subscribers, we used active readers, calculated based on TGStat data on average post reach (ERR) for each media project’s channel. Instead of JX Fund’s cross-channel overlap coefficient of 6.7x, we used overlap values measured directly by Cedar in their 2025 report for 11 large projects’ Telegram channels, then applied the overlap pattern observed within this group to the long tail of remaining channels in our sample.⁸³
• YouTube: Instead of JX Fund’s views-to-unique-viewers ratio of 1.1–1.4x applied across the sample, we used channel-level bucketing on publication frequency and views-per-video, calibrated against YouScore traffic data collected at Step 1. Instead of JX Fund’s within-platform deduplication of 2.7x, we used 4.5x to reflect the denser cross-channel overlap in our wider media projects sample. On top of that, we added a 1.6–1.8x long-form penalty for long-format interviewer channels, where multisession viewing structurally lowers views-per-unique.

Five additional coefficients have no JX Fund analogue and are anchored on traffic data, media project interviews, and survey-based priors or comparable market benchmarks where none of the above applies. These are: 

• Per incidental users: The first four coefficients were the views-without-clicks of project websites’ materials on Google search and Google Discover data traffic; the YouTube Shorts that a nonsubscriber typically watches; the number of forwarded posts from a media project that a nonsubscriber typically encounters; and the number of downstream viewers that a single forwarded post reaches. 
• Per crisis-driven users: The fifth coefficient was based on a rolling 12-month median baseline around all observed traffic spikes in 2022–26 from the Step 1 monthly time-series data. Surge views were then divided by views per crisis-driven user during the spike month to yield unique crisis-driven users.

The three tiers were summed at the end, with within- and cross-platform deduplication applied inside each tier. In our quarterly headline (Q1 2026), the сore tier—JX Fund’s habitual readership recalibrated as above—lands at 5.8m / 6.9m / 8.4m in the low / middle / high scenarios. On top of that, the incidental tier adds 4.6m / 5.7m / 7.8m, and the crisis-driven tier adds 6.9m / 8.2m / 9.2m over core.

Comprehensive Report

Russian Civil Society in Exile 

By Sam Greene and Evgeny Roshchin

Despite severe repression, Russian civil society groups remain a critical bastion for democracy.

June 25, 2026

Learn More

About the Authors

Mikhail Komin

Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a political scientist and Russia expert focusing on elites, the bureaucracy, government data, and the policymaking process.

Evgeny Roshchin

Dr. Evgeny Roshchin leads the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of “Professorial Silence”, “Exit as Voice”, “Crime and Punishment in International Politics” and many other academic articles, and media commentaries.

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian civil society organizations and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. The authors are grateful to CEPA staff members Christopher Walker, Michael Newton, David Kagan, Isabella Nieminen, and Talia Martin, whose editorial and production support were invaluable elements of the release of this report. The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian independent media projects and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. They also extend personal thanks to Dmitry Kolezev, journalist and founder of the YouScore project; Lev Gershenzon, founder of The True Story news aggregator; and Alesya Sokolova, researcher at the CEDAR think tank, for the data they provided for the quantitative part of this research.

Mikhail Komin would also like to express his gratitude to his wife, Dr. Viktoria P., and his friend, Mr. Churchill the Dog, whose steady support helped him navigate the personal and professional challenges of 2026 and complete this report.

CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

1. Masha Lipman and Michael McFaul, “‘Managed Democracy’ in Russia: Putin and the Press,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 6, no. 3 (2001): 116–127, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/108118001129172260; and Rashed Chowdhury, “Constraints on the Russian Media,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 6, 2003, https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/events/2003/10/constraints-on-the-russian-media. [↩]
2. “Закон о фейках и публичные мероприятия” [The law on fake news and public events], OVD-Info, February 22, 2026, https://ovdinfo.legal/instruction/zakon-o-feykah-i-publichnye-meropriyatiya. [↩]
3. “‘Эхо Москвы’ отключили от эфира” [Ekho Moskvy was taken off the air], RBC, March 1, 2022, rbc.ru/politics/01/03/2022/621e60dd9a7947247bba7c5e; “Мы приостанавливаем работу” [We are suspending operations], Novaya Gazeta, March 28, 2022, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/28/my-priostanavlivaem-rabotu; and “Телеканал Дождь временно приостанавливает свою работу” [TV Rain is temporarily suspending its operations], TV Rain, March 4, 2022, https://tvrain.tv/news/telekanal_dozhd_vremenno_priostanavlivaet_svoju_rabotu-549051/. [↩]
4. “World Press Freedom Index 2026,” Reporters Without Borders, https://rsf.org/en/index. [↩]
5. Sustaining Independence: Current State of Russian Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2023), https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sustaining_Independence-Current_State_of_Russian_Media_in_Exile_2023.pdf. [↩]
6. “Журналистика в современной России—это преступление. И не одно” [Journalism in modern Russia is a crime. And not just one], Meduza, September 9, 2025, https://meduza.io/slides/zhurnalistika-v-sovremennoy-rossii-eto-prestuplenie-i-ne-odno. [↩]
7. Maria Repnikova, “Contesting the State Under Authoritarianism: Critical Journalists in China and Russia,” Comparative Politics51, no. 1 (October 2018): 41–60, https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cuny/cp/2018/00000051/00000001/art00004; and Basyouni Ibrahim Hamada and Abdel-Salam G. Abdel-Salam, “Determinants of Watchdog Journalism: A Global Empirical Approach,” International Communication Gazette 87, no. 3 (April 2025),  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17480485241288401. [↩]
8. “OVD-Info,” Inoteka, https://inoteka.io/ino/ovd-info; and “Давление на журналистов и медиа в 2025 году” [Pressure on journalists and media in 2025], Center for the Defense of Media Rights, January 22, 2026, https://mmdc.ru/blog/2026/01/22/davlenie-2025-god/. [↩]
9. “Четыре года после Бучи: российские власти продолжают бороться с постами о жестоких убийствах мирных жителей в Украине” [Four years after Bucha: Russian authorities continue to crack down on posts about the brutal killings of civilians in Ukraine], Novaya Gazeta, April 1, 2026, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/04/01/chetyre-goda-posle-buchi-rossiiskie-vlasti-prodolzhaiut-borotsia-s-postami-o-zhestokikh-ubiistvakh-mirnykh-zhitelei-v-ukraine. [↩]
10. “Verfolgung von Medienschaffenden im Exil” [Persecution of media professionals in exile], RSF, October 17, 2025, https://www.reporter-ohne-grenzen.de/artikel/pressemitteilungen/4122/verfolgung-von-medienschaffenden-im-exil. [↩]
11. “World Press Freedom Index: Russia,” RSF, https://rsf.org/en/country/russia. [↩]
12. “‘Vika Isn’t Getting Up!’—Witnesses Recount the Final Days of a Ukrainian Journalist Who Died in a Russian Prison,” RSF, April 22, 2026, https://rsf.org/en/vika-isn-t-getting-witnesses-recount-final-days-ukrainian-journalist-who-died-russian-prison. [↩]
13. Roskomnadzor acquired the authority to block internet resources extrajudicially on specified grounds—including politically inflected ones, such as alleged calls to participate in unauthorized protests—as early as 2012. Representatives of blocked resources could challenge the restrictions in court, but such appeals rarely resulted in unblocking. See for example “ЕСПЧ получил жалобы Каспарова и ‘Грани.ру’ на блокировку их сайтов” [European Court of Human Rights received complaints from Kasparov and Grani.ru regarding the blocking of their websites], Center for the Defense of Media Rights, June 17, 2015, https://mmdc.ru/blog/2015/06/17/espch_poluchil_zhaloby_kasparova_i_graniru_na_blokirovku_ih_sajtov/; “В Роскомнадзоре назвали число заблокированных страниц сайтов с пропагандой наркотиков” [Roskomnadzor has released the number of web pages blocked for promoting drugs], Roskomnadzor, February 28, 2020, https://rkn.gov.ru/press/publications/news72126.htm. [↩]
14. “ЖЖ Навального, Каспаров.ру, Грани.ру и ЕЖ запрещены” [Navalny’s LiveJournal, Kasparov.ru, Grani.ru, and Daily Journal are banned], British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), March 13, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/russian/russia/2014/03/140313_russia_oppo_sites_blocked. [↩]
15. Yelizaveta Surganova, “‘Это позор и ******’ Как медиарынок отреагировал на смену главного редактора ‘Ленты.ру’” [‘It’s a disgrace and a ******’ How the media market reacted to the change of editor in chief of Lenta.ru], Lenta.ru, March 13, 2014, https://lenta.ru/articles/2014/03/13/lenta/. [↩]
16. “Разгром РБК” [RBC debacle], Meduza, May 13, 2016, https://meduza.io/feature/2016/05/13/razgrom-rbk-korotko. [↩]
17. “В 2022 году власти заблокировали более 247 тысяч интернет-ресурсов” [In 2022, authorities blocked more than 247,000 internet resources], Roskomsvoboda, December 28, 2022, https://roskomsvoboda.org/ru/post/o-blokirovkah/. [↩]
18. “Непрозрачность и беззаконие: под военную цензуру попали 9300 интернет-ресурсов” [Lack of transparency and lawlessness: 9,300 internet resources have fallen under military censorship], Roskomsvoboda, December 22, 2022, https://roskomsvoboda.org/ru/post/voyennaya-cenzura-god-2022/. [↩]
19. “Сайт ‘Эхо’ заблокировали в России” [Ekho website has been blocked in Russia], Kommersant, October 6, 2022, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5595818. [↩]
20. Anna Ustinova, “Роскомнадзор значительно увеличил блокировку запрещенного контента в 2025 году” [Roskomnadzor significantly increased blocking of prohibited content in 2025], Vedomosti, January 19, 2026, https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2026/01/19/1170063-roskomnadzor-znachitelno-uvelichil-blokirovku-zapreschennogo-kontenta. [↩]
21. The short-video platform TikTok has not been formally blocked in Russia, but since March 2022 it has restricted its own operations in the country. Without circumvention tools, users in Russia cannot upload new content, live-stream videos, monetize their content, or view videos posted from abroad after 2022. The application still opens, but the Russian version of TikTok is “frozen” at the level of early 2022. Circumvention tools are required to regain access to the live, up-to-date global platform. [↩]
22. “С 1 сентября в России запретили рекламу в инстаграме (и не только в нем). Теперь блогерам и компаниям грозят штрафы вплоть до полумиллиона рублей” [As of September 1, advertising on Instagram (and elsewhere) was banned in Russia. Now, bloggers and companies face fines of up to half a million rubles], Meduza, September 4, 2025, https://meduza.io/cards/s-1-sentyabrya-v-rossii-zapretili-reklamu-v-instagrame-i-ne-tolko-v-nem-teper-blogeram-i-kompaniyam-grozyat-shtrafy-vplot-do-polumilliona-rubley; “Дума приняла закон о регистрации владельцев телеграм-каналов в РКН” [The Duma passed a law on registering Telegram channel owners with Roskomnadzor], RBC, July 30, 2024, https://www.rbc.ru/politics/30/07/2024/66a8a0bc9a794718a35f8c0d. [↩]
23. For details on the aggressive promotion of Max and VK Video, see Varvara Platova, “Max неизбежен” [Max is inevitable], Novaya Gazeta, September 1, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/09/01/max-neizbezhen; and “Зрители не настоящие. Просмотры накручены. Но это не проблема” [The viewers aren’t real. The views are fake. But that’s not a problem], Meduza, December 25, 2023, https://meduza.io/feature/2023/12/25/zriteli-ne-nastoyaschie-prosmotry-nakrucheny-no-eto-ne-problema. [↩]
24. These traffic data are based on the public information regularly provided by Mediascope (see the data explorer here: https://mediascope.net/data/). Mediascope is formally a private company but operates as a de facto state-sanctioned monopoly handling the measurement of audiences for Russian television (since 2017) and internet services (since 2022). A controlling stake of Mediascope is held by VCIOM (the Russian Public Opinion Research Center), a 100% state-owned polling institution. While these institutional links warrant cautious interpretation of Mediascope data, its estimates generally align with independent third-party metrics, such as panel-based or traffic-based estimates (e.g., Similarweb), which have more limited coverage and granularity; “Ни телеграммом больше” [No more telegrams], Kommersant, April 27, 2026, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8623399. [↩]
25. “Mediascope назвал ‘VK Видео’ самым популярным видеохостингом в России в январе” [Mediascope named VK Video the most popular video-hosting service in Russia in January], Vedomosti, February 9, 2026, https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/news/2026/02/09/1175014-mediascope-nazval-vk-video. [↩]
26. Deimantė Karaciejūtė, “VPN Adoption Rates by Country: Trends and Statistics,” Cybernews, October 21, 2025, https://cybernews.com/best-vpn/vpn-usage-by-country/; “Пользователи идут в обход” [Users take a detour], Kommersant, April 28, 2026, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8624480. [↩]
27. “Сбои без правил” [Crashes without rules], Kommersant, April 10, 2026, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8572976; A VPN protocol is the technical standard used to establish an encrypted connection; a VPN application, such as the consumer service NordVPN, may support multiple protocols. Blocking an application removes one provider, while blocking a protocol disrupts an entire class of VPN services. By early 2026, Roskomnadzor had targeted several widely used protocols, including OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2/IPsec, as well as more sophisticated protocols such as Shadowsocks and VLESS, though with less clear effectiveness. [↩]
28. “Проблемы с мобильным интернетом и блокировка иностранных мессенджеров: март 2026” [Mobile internet issues and blocking of foreign messaging apps: March 2026], Levada-Center, March 31, 2026, https://www.levada.ru/2026/03/31/problemy-s-mobilnym-internetom-i-blokirovka-inostrannyh-messendzherov-mart-2026/; and ZaTelekom, “По поводу проникновения VPN в ширнармассы” [Regarding VPN penetration among the masses], Telegram, March 30. 2026, https://t.me/zatelecom/32814. It is worth keeping in mind that not every VPN user in Russia is seeking blocked content. VPNs are also a routine professional tool, deployed by banks, telecommunications companies, health care providers, and other organizations to secure internal networks and remote access. The share of such users is difficult to estimate with precision, though we know that corporate VPN procurement contracts increased by 18.5% in 2025. See details here: Anastasiya Gavrilyuk, “Частным образом: закупки VPN-сервисов в госсекторе растут” [Private: Public-sector VPN purchases are growing], Forbes, February 8, 2026, https://www.forbes.ru/tekhnologii/554920-castnym-obrazom-zakupki-vpn-servisov-v-gossektore-rastut. [↩]
29. Vladimir Zvonovsky and Aleksandr Khodykin, “За флажки” [For the flags], Teletype, April 12, 2026, https://teletype.in/@vl.bell/cFCHdDle8Vk. [↩]
30. Ekaterina Krasotkina, “‘Страх и отвращение в Max.’ Как россиян не смогли пересадить на ‘национальный мессенджер’” [‘Fear and loathing in Max.’ How Russians failed to switch to the ‘national messenger’], Verstka, December 29, 2025, https://verstka.media/kak-rossiyan-ne-smogli-peresadit-na-naczionalnyi-messendzher. [↩]
31. Access Denied: How the Kremlin Controls the Internet—and How to Resist It (Anti-Corruption Foundation, March 2026), https://fbk.info/files/acf-internet-report-EN.pdf. [↩]
32. “Как и зачем российские приложения ищут на телефонах пользователей VPN?” [How and why do Russian apps search for VPN users on phones?], RKS Global, April 2026, https://rks.global/ru/research/vpn-detection/. [↩]
33. “Если у вас есть такая возможность, заведите второй телефон: это самая надежная гарантия того, что вы и дальше сможете обходить цензуру Роскомнадзора” [If you have the opportunity, get a second phone: This is the most reliable guarantee that you will continue to be able to bypass Roskomnadzor censorship], Meduza, April 23, 2026, https://meduza.io/cards/esli-u-vas-est-takaya-vozmozhnost-zavedite-vtoroy-telefon-eto-samaya-nadezhnaya-garantiya-togo-chto-vy-i-dalshe-smozhete-obhodit-tsenzuru-roskomnadzora. [↩]
34. “Russians Are Now Being Fined for Reposting Content from ‘Undesirable’ News Media. Most Penalties Are Linked to Meduza,” Mediazona, April 26, 2024, https://en.zona.media/article/2024/04/26/undesirable-trl; and “Россия сделала шаг в сторону ‘криминализации чтения’. Читать независимые СМИ еще можно, а вот с ‘экстремистами’ надо быть осторожнее” [Russia hastaken a step toward ‘criminalizing reading.’ Reading independent media is still possible, but one must be more careful with ‘extremists’], Meduza, July 16, 2025, https://meduza.io/cards/rossiya-sdelala-shag-v-storonu-kriminalizatsii-chteniya-chitat-nezavisimye-smi-esche-mozhno-a-vot-s-ekstremistami-nado-byt-ostorozhnee. [↩]
35. Ethan Zuckerman, “Why Study Media Ecosystems?,” in Understanding Movement Parties Through Their Communication, ed. Dan Mercea and Lorenzo Mosca (New York: Routledge, 2023), https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003369363-10/study-media-ecosystems-ethan-zuckerman. [↩]
36. This figure does not capture the full range of media projects that reach Russian-language audiences inside Russia. We exclude the smaller projects that fall below our traffic threshold and those that are non-Russian in origin. The latter include the Russian-language services of foreign public broadcasters such as the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Poland’s TVP; Ukrainian outlets that maintain a Russian-language version, such as Obozrevatel and Censor.net, or Ukrainian bloggers who produce content at least partly in Russian, such as Taras Berezovets or Roman Tsymbaliuk; and Belarusian exiled media operating in Russian, such as Nexta Live or Zerkalo. [↩]
37. Alternative classifications vary in their estimates for the Russian exiled media. JX Fund, a specialized donor supporting exiled journalism, is currently tracking 63 exiled media projects, down from 93 in 2023. See “Russian Media in Exile Since 2022,” JX Fund, November 28, 2025, https://jx-fund.org/countries/russia/. However, other experts’ estimates suggest that the number is higher. See for example Kseniya Lychenko, “Внутри и снаружи цензуры: российский медиаландшафт через два года после начала войны” [Inside and outside censorship: The Russian media landscape two years after the war], Re: Russia, May 22, 2024, https://re-russia.net/expertise/0154/; and “Диффузный медиапейзаж: Путину не удалось создать полноценную медиадиктатуру—и не удастся, если ему не поможет Трамп” [Diffuse media landscape: Putin has failed to create a full-fledged media dictatorship—and will not unless Trump helps him], Re: Russia, February 3, 2025, https://re-russia.net/analytics/0243/. [↩]
38. Of the 131 Russian independent media projects included in our analysis, only 12 operate primarily from inside Russia. They are predominantly small teams concentrated in the region-focused category, or fragments of formerly larger legacy editorial outlets whose staff did not leave the country along with their colleagues. All but two have had their websites or other channels blocked by Russian authorities. [↩]
39. “Внимание! ‘Медуза’ ищет авторов в России. Да, именно в России” [Attention! Meduza is looking for writers in Russia. Yes, in Russia], Meduza, April 24, 2026, https://meduza.io/feature/2026/04/24/vnimanie-meduza-ischet-avtorov-v-rossii-da-imenno-v-rossii; and Tatyana Dvornikova, “Россия на удаленке. Исследование лучших практик российских медиа в изгнании” [Russia remotely: A study of best practices of Russian media in exile], openDemocracy, January 15, 2024, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/rossiya-na-udalenke-issledovaniye-rossiyskikh-media-v-izgnanii/. [↩]
40. See his full expert commentary here: “Russian Media in Exile Since 2022,” JX Fund, November 28, 2025, https://jx-fund.org/countries/russia/. [↩]
41. Gretel Kahn, “Forced Out from Print and Airwaves, News Media in Venezuela Shift to Digital to Survive,” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, March 14, 2023, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/forced-out-print-and-airwaves-news-media-venezuela-shift-digital-survive; and Colin Porlezza and Rana Arafat, “Promoting Newsafety from Exile: The Emergence of New Journalistic Roles in Diaspora Journalists’ Networks,” Journalism Practice 16, no. 9 (2022): 1,867–89, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2021.1925947. [↩]
42. The True Story, https://thetruestory.news/ru/russia; Two methodological caveats apply to this figure. First, the share attributed to Russian independent media projects is likely subject to downward bias. A substantial number of outlets have been designated as “undesirable organizations,” which renders the dissemination of their material by state-aligned outlets a legal violation. Even when state media draw substantively on independent outlets’ reporting, they routinely omit both the outlet’s name and any direct citation, meaning the borrowings are invisible to monitoring. Second, the sample of outlets monitored by The True Story excludes several of the most ideologically explicit state propaganda outlets (Tsargrad, Life.ru, Izvestia, and others). These outlets are registered as sources and counted within the data when cited by other monitored media, including state-affiliated outlets such as Vedomosti or Interfax, but cross-citation among the propaganda outlets themselves falls outside the dataset. This issue in the data likely understates the share of state media. [↩]
43. Citation rates for the same projects in English-language foreign media are similarly high: Innovation as the Driving Survival Force: The State of the Russian Independent Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2025), 13, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RU-EXIM-Report-2025.pdf. [↩]
44. Innovation as the Driving Survival Force: The State of the Russian Independent Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2025), 14, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RU-EXIM-Report-2025.pdf; For JX Fund’s working definition of exiled media, see “What We Consider Independent Media in Exile,” JX Fund, https://jx-fund.org/country-profiles/#645cf59cdd2d6. The number of Russian outlets that the fund classifies as active within the Russian media ecosystem shifts over time: in 2023 it tracked 93 such projects; by 2026 the figure had contracted to 63. [↩]
45. “Федеральный закон от 27.11.2023 N 540-ФЗ (ред. от 12.07.2024) ‘О федеральном бюджете на 2024 год и на плановый период 2025 и 2026 годов’” [Federal law of November 27, 2023, N 540-FZ (as amended on July 12, 2024) ‘On the federal budget for 2024 and for the planning period of 2025 and 2026’], ConsultantPlus, https://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_462891/c98e2052294b4edcea118e7a15bc0ec0de1d84f7/. The structure of the Russian federal budget does not allow for an exact breakdown of how much is spent specifically on online media, as opposed to television or radio; such a figure would permit a more precise comparison with the budgets of Russian independent media operating online. Our rough estimate places the 2024 federal budget funding for online projects of the state media at 40bn to 60bn rubles ($470m to $700m). [↩]
46. Alesya Sokolova, What Do Russians Read, and How Can Independent Media Reach Them? (Center for Data and Research on Russia [Cedar], March 2025), https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read. [↩]
47. The decline in website traffic was driven initially by the February–March 2022 wave of official blocking, but two additional trends reinforced it. First, many Russian independent media projects that were launched in exile prioritized Telegram and YouTube over websites; only 40% of those in our sample maintain a website, while 91% are available via Telegram and 71% are on YouTube. Second, the sharper decline in 2025–26 reflects broader global shifts linked to the spread of artificial intelligence. For details on that phenomenon, see for example Sara Fischer, “Exclusive: Small Publishers Hit Hardest by Search Traffic Declines,” Axios, March 17, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/03/17/chartbeat-search-traffic-ai-chatbots. [↩]
48. Part of Telegram’s crisis-time growth comes from higher posting frequency, as media shift to 24/7 live coverage. For example, during Prigozhin’s mutiny, independent media projects posted 70% above their weekly average. At the same time, however, the average per-post reach (ERR) rose by 40–45%. In other words, the surge in traffic reflected not only more output, but also wider audience engagement. [↩]
49. Although Figure 5 shows that growth on Telegram and YouTube has more than compensated for declining website traffic, these figures illustrate the total number of views rather than unique users. Moreover, the total number here does not capture the loss of traditional distribution channels that independent media had used before 2022. For example, in 2021, Ekho Moskvy broadcast its content legally on FM radio, reaching 2m unique listeners each week in Moscow alone; Novaya Gazeta and Sobesednik distributed a combined 150,000 to 200,000 copies of their print editions across major Russian cities. See 2021 Radio Index (Moscow: Mediascope, 2021), https://mediascope.net/upload/iblock/5e7/RI_2021_1_report.pdf; and Novaya Gazeta, January 31, 2022, https://novayagazeta.ru/issues/3221. [↩]
50. Sustaining Independence: Current State of Russian Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2023), 13–14, 31–33, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sustaining_Independence-Current_State_of_Russian_Media_in_Exile_2023.pdf. [↩]
51. Judith Möller et al., “Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit?,” Social Science Computer Review 38, no. 5 (2020): 616–32, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0894439319828012; and Julie Vulpius et al., “Exploring Changing News Repertoires: Towards a Typology,” Journalism 24, no. 1 (2023): 78–100, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14648849211047384. [↩]
52. Svenja Schäfer, “Incidental News Exposure in a Digital Media Environment: A Scoping Review of Recent Research,” Annals of the International Communication Association 47, no. 2 (2023): 242–60, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23808985.2023.2169953. [↩]
53. Unlike most major platforms, Telegram has no recommendation feed. Users mainly see channels that they chose to follow themselves. Incidental news exposure instead comes from the merging of private chats and channel posts in the same interface. In practice, people encounter news while messaging friends or through posts that are forwarded into personal conversations. [↩]
54. Peter Van Aelst et al., “Does a Crisis Change News Habits? A Comparative Study of the Effects of COVID-19 on News Media Use in 17 European Countries,” Digital Journalism 9, no. 9 (2021): 1,208–38, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21670811.2021.1943481. [↩]
55. Across all three audience types, we measure the reach of Russian independent media projects only on their websites, Telegram, and YouTube, excluding other major platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. One reason is timing: access to the latter platforms was restricted in Russia earlier than to YouTube and Telegram, making them less conducive to the audience surges that independent outlets experienced after 2022, though recent research observed that in 2025–26 such outlets had significant subscriber growth on Instagram and TikTok for the first time since the full-scale invasion. Another reason is methodological: unlike YouTube or Telegram, Instagram and TikTok do not have an elaborated public API access, and third-party analytics services provide little reliable traffic data for them. Even so, both platforms likely account for a meaningful share of incidental media consumption in Russia, meaning the total reach of Russian independent media projects is probably higher than our estimates suggest. [↩]
56. Sustaining Independence: Current State of Russian Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2023), https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sustaining_Independence-Current_State_of_Russian_Media_in_Exile_2023.pdf; Dmitry Gudkov, “Из моего сегодняшнеговыступления на заседании в ПАСЕ” [From my speech today at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe session], Facebook, April 23, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/dgudkov/posts/pfbid02UKX6E1zuCMJfvBSvFPhWmpkHjYc52haaXSwQThepaAv3Pn4YgqcbeRszc5UniwDrl. [↩]
57. TV Rain, “Путин напуган: интернет отключают. Бунт в Сибири. Трамп в ловушке войны. Ремесло против Кремля” [Putin is scared: The internet is being shut down. Riot in Siberia. Trump is trapped in war. Crafts against the Kremlin], YouTube, March 20, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/live/ksRsS_Ecat8?si=7_4 wvw_slHePSH5F; Alesya Sokolova, “84% аудитории независимых медиа остались в Telegram, несмотря на блокировки” [84% of independent media audiences remain on Telegram despite blocking], Novaya Gazeta, April 3, 2026, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/04/03/84-auditorii-nezavisimykh-media-ostalis-v-telegram-nesmotria-na-blokirovki. [↩]
58. Ilya Yablokov and Vasily Gatov, “Broadcasting Through the (New) Iron Curtain: Practices, Challenges, and Legacies of Russia’s Independent Media in Exile,” Journalism Studies, February 11, 2025, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2025.2462550. [↩] [↩]
59. Что случилось [What happened], Meduza, https://meduza.io/podcasts/meduza-v-kurse; TV Rain, И так далее с Михаилом Фишманом [And so on with Mikhail Fishman], YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr0vtm6PM7z0xMS4mKgYYr6sbNG-bm9av; Статус [Status], Ekho, https://echofm.online/programs/status. [↩]
60. Novaya Gazeta, “Похороны Навального. Трансляция из Москвы” [Navalny’s funeral. Broadcast from Moscow], YouTube, March 1, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BizfWCuzlMo; Zhivoy Gvozd, “Вечер на Живом гвозде. Дмитрий Быков** и Алексей Венедиктов*” [An evening at Zhivoy Gvozd. Dmitry Bykov** and Aleksey Venediktov**], YouTube, April 16, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0XYMCaYuEo. [↩]
61. Doxa, https://doxa.team/; and SVTV, https://svtv.org/. [↩]
62. For examples of outlet-based VPNs, see Meduza’s Media VPN at https://mediavpn.net/ or Paper’s PaperVPN at https://papervpn.io/; for examples of those associated with media personalities on YouTube and Telegram, see nVPN at https://nvpn.work/ or Status VPN at https://t.me/statussvpnbot. [↩]
63. “Как подготовиться к отключению интернета” [How to prepare for an internet outage], Novaya Gazeta, May 6, 2026, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/05/06/kak-podgotovitsia-k-otkliucheniiu-interneta; “Обыск может застать врасплох даже самых законопослушных россиян. Как подготовиться к приходу силовиков—и снизить для себя риски?” [A house search can catch even the most law-abiding Russians off guard. How can you prepare for the arrival of law enforcement and reduce yoru risks?], Meduza, April 6, 2025, https://meduza.io/feature/2025/04/06/obysk-mozhet-zastat-vrasploh-dazhe-samyh-zakonoposlushnyh-rossiyan-kak-podgotovitsya-k-prihodu-silovikov-i-snizit-dlya-sebya-riski; “Как спорить с близкими, которые поверили пропаганде. Инструкция” [How to argue with loved ones who believe propaganda. Instructions], Greenhouse of Social Technologies, October 3, 2022, https://te-st.org/2022/10/03/how-to-communiate-during-war/; “Вокруг сплошная боль и несправедливость. Как не сойти с ума от новостей?” [There’s pain and injustice all around us. How can you avoid going crazy from the news?], Meduza, May 30, 2021, https://meduza.io/feature/2021/05/30/vokrug-sploshnaya-bol-i-nespravedlivost-kak-ne-soyti-s-uma-ot-novostey. [↩]
64. Лес рук [Flower Power], https://flowerpower.meduza.io/hall-of-fame. [↩]
65. The data were collected by scraping Meduza’s crowdfunding platform Flower Power, which contained 449 donor testimonials by May 2026. Narrative categories were identified through manual coding of a random subsample of 50 testimonials and then scaled to the full corpus using dictionary-based automated content coding. Category-specific lexicons of keywords and collocations were applied algorithmically at the sentence and clause level, allowing each testimonial to be assigned to up to three narrative categories. Robustness checks using three different prevalence metrics produced consistent rankings across categories. [↩]
66. Xenia Loutchenko, “Как же я за эти три с половиной года задолбалась каждое утро просыпаться и первым делом открывать в тг Бибиси и Медузу—и если ничего за ночь не произошло, то ок, можно потихоньку продвигаться в сторону кофе, а вот если, как сегодня, то смотреть тупо на телефон, собираться с мыслями и писать в Киев ‘ты как?’” [I am so damn sick of waking up every morning these past three and a half years and immediately opening the BBC and Meduza on Telegram—if nothing happened overnight, fine, I can slowly make my way toward the coffee; but if something did—like today—then I just stare blankly at my phone, gather my thoughts, and message Kyiv: ‘How are you?’], Facebook, September 28, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/share/p/167CX5pPh5. [↩]
67. Maxim Alyukov, Making Sense of the News Under an Electoral Authoritarian Regime: Russian TV Viewers and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict (Helsinki: Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, 2021), https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/a3c35138-9489-4076-b906-057d1be73c68/content. [↩]
68. See for example the success of the Drama Queens format by TV Rain. More details here: Yury Dud, “Сплетни, споры, политика: Drama Queens—во ‘вДуде’” [Gossip, controversy, politics: Drama Queens on ‘vDud’], YouTube, December 10, 2025, https://youtu.be/KkZ6Ck_tHLM?si=nrsQ_Qg1tPQWxEww; For example, the culture-focused Meduza subproject Plot, launched in 2024, has only 35,000 subscribers on Telegram (https://t.me/plottwist_m) as of May 2026, whereas the Meduza main channel (launched in 2016) has over 1.1m subscribers (https://t.me/meduzalive). [↩]
69. Innovation as the Driving Survival Force: The State of the Russian Independent Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2025), 15, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RU-EXIM-Report-2025.pdf. [↩]
70. Эхо Книги [Ekho books], https://echo-books.com/; Novaya Europe Shop, https://shop.novayagazeta.eu/ru; Либо/Либо [Either/or], https://course.libolibo.ru/; “Закажи IT-проект, поддержи независимое медиа” [Order an IT project, support independent media], Most Media, https://mostmedia.org/ru/it-project. [↩]
71. Innovation as the Driving Survival Force: The State of the Russian Independent Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2025), 18, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RU-EXIM-Report-2025.pdf. [↩]
72. Yuliya Akhmedova, “‘Ни паспорт, ни место жительства—не приговор’” [‘Neither a passport nor a place of residence is a death sentence’], Novaya Gazeta, April 9, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/04/09/ni-pasport-ni-mesto-zhitelstva-ne-prigovor. [↩]
73. Diana Shahbazyan, Space for Freedom: Exiled Journalists’ Need Assessment (Bonn: Deutsche Welle, March 2025), https://akademie.dw.com/en/space-for-freedom-exiled-journalists-need-assessment/a-72065841. [↩]
74. Olga Churakova, “Вон из профессии. С чем сталкивается новое поколение российских журналистов” [Out of the profession: What the new generation of Russian journalists faces], Important Stories, April 1, 2026, https://istories.media/stories/2026/04/01/von-iz-professii-s-chem-stalkivaetsya-novoe-pokolenie-rossiiskikh-zhurnalistov/. [↩]
75. “YouTube Channel Monetization Policies,” Google, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en; Kseniya Luchenko, “Внутри и снаружи цензуры: российский медиаландшафт через два года после начала войны” [Inside and outside censorship: The Russian media landscape two years after the war], Re: Russia, May 22, 2024, https://re-russia.net/expertise/0154/. [↩]
76. Zach Vallese, “YouTube Wipes Out Thousands of Propaganda Channels Linked to China, Russia, Others,” CNBC, July 21, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/21/youtube-channels-propaganda-china-russia.html; Agentstvo, “Google лишил миллионов просмотров ‘Комсомольскую правду’ и ‘Царьград’” [Google has deprived Komsomolskaya Pravda and Tsargrad of millions of views], Telegram, November 20, 2023, https://t.me/agentstvonews/4561. [↩]
77. “Apple удаляет приложения Радио Свобода из российского AppStore” [Apple removes Radio Liberty apps from the Russian App Store], Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 18, 2024, https://www.svoboda.org/a/apple-udalit-vse-prilozheniya-radio-svoboda-iz-rossiyskogo-appstore/33163978.html; and “Unveiling the Extent of VPN App Removals by Apple from the Russia App Store: An Analysis of Silent Removals and the Need for Transparency,” AppleCensorship, September 24, 2024, https://applecensorship.com/news/unveiling-the-extent-of-vpn-app-removals-by-apple-from-the-russia-app-store-an-analysis-of-silent-removals-and-the-need-for-transparency. [↩]
78. “RSF и независимые российские журналисты призывают крупнейшие технологические компании создать группу ‘Инженеры против диктатуры’ с целью предотвратить отключение российских веб-сайтов” [RSF and independent Russian journalists are calling on major tech companies to form an ‘Engineers Against Dictatorship’ group to prevent the blocking of Russian websites], Reporters Without Borders, June 8, 2023, https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2023/06/RSF%20и%20независимые%20российские%20журналисты%20призывают%20крупнейшие%20технологические%20компании%20создать%20группу.pdf; Yuliya Navalnaya, “В последнее время часто приходится слышать один и тот же тезис: для Путина все удачно складывается. Он уверен в себе, идет от победы к победе, и все у него получается” [Lately, I have been hearing the same thesis a lot: everything is going well for Putin. He is confident, he is going from victory to victory, and everything is working out for him], Instagram, December 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DDzpTOLNITt/?img_index=1; Raphael Minder, “EU Urges Big Tech to Promote Opposition Media in Belarus,” Financial Times, January 8, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/0b33b19f-6ded-4458-be0b-b335cdf31f17. [↩]
79. Sam Greene et al., War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War (Washington: Center for European Policy Analysis, 2026), https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/war-without-end-deterring-russias-shadow-war/. [↩]
80. See for example Meduza’s survey on its website and app, “Из какой страны вы читаете ‘Медузу’?” [From what country are you reading Meduza?], Meduza, May 6, 2026, https://meduza.io/survey/iz-kakoy-strany-vy-chitaete-meduzu; or the TV Rain survey on its Telegram channel, TV Rain, “Друзья, нам важно узнать, откуда вы нас читаете” [Friends, it is important for us to know where you read us from], Telegram, February 6, 2026, https://t.me/tvrain/100498. [↩]
81. See for example Maria Kiseleva, Still Listening: Audience Strategies of Russia-Focused Media in Exile (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, March 2025), https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-07/RISJ%20Fellows%20Project_Masha_HT25_Final%201_1.pdf. [↩]
82. Sustaining Independence: Current State of Russian Media in Exile (Berlin: JX Fund, November 2023), 13–14, 31–33, https://jx-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sustaining_Independence-Current_State_of_Russian_Media_in_Exile_2023.pdf. [↩]
83. Alesya Sokolova, What Do Russians Read, and How Can Independent Media Reach Them? (Cedar, March 2025), https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read. [↩]