How Russian Journalists in Exile Are Covering the War in Ukraine
The New Yorker · by Masha Gessen · March 6, 2023
On December 1st, TV Rain, an independent Russian television station that had been banned from Russian cable and satellite channels, was in its fifth month of broadcasting from Riga, the capital of Latvia. Most of its journalists had fled Moscow during the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dispersing to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, and elsewhere, only to discover in exile that, to much of the world, they represented a country waging genocidal war. Banks wouldn’t accept them as clients, landlords wouldn’t rent to them, and residents in Tbilisi and other cities painted “Russians go home” on street corners. Early on, two Baltic states were exceptions: Lithuania, which had long served as a base for Russia’s political opposition, and Latvia. Last March, the country’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, tweeted, “As #Russia closes independent media and introduces complete censorship, I reiterate Latvia’s readiness to host persecuted Russian journalists and help them in any way we can.”
TV Rain now had three studios—in Riga, Amsterdam, and Tbilisi—and a Latvian license, which allowed it to broadcast on cable channels in the European Union. Alexey Korostelev, who was hosting that afternoon’s episode of the newscast “Here and Now,” was working out of the Tbilisi studio, a generic space in an office tower on the outskirts of the city. Korostelev, who was twenty-seven, came from a small town near Moscow, and got his first job at TV Rain by winning an on-air contest in college. Like other journalists in exile, he had had to reinvent reporting, under near-impossible conditions: his job was to cover the Russian-Ukrainian war, but he couldn’t return to Russia or enter Ukraine, which has severely restricted access for Russian citizens. Korostelev, who was accustomed to working with a crew on his video stories, had learned to cobble together recorded phone calls and a lot of narrative voice-over. “More like a print story,” he told me.
Korostelev introduced a report about Sergey Safonov, the commanding officer of Russia’s 27th Motorized Rifle Brigade, who is suspected of stabbing an elderly Ukrainian woman to death near the town of Izyum. Sonya Groysman, a twenty-eight-year-old TV Rain correspondent based in Riga, had been able to interview Safonov’s bodyguard, a sergeant named Vyacheslav Doronichev. Speaking into the camera of a shaky cell phone, Doronichev said that his boss and other senior officers had spent months “drinking vodka, and terrorizing local residents.” He added, “They would cut off people’s ears and fingers.” Under any circumstances, an active-duty officer of the Russian Army testifying, on camera, to apparent war crimes would have been a major scoop; as a piece reported from exile, it was a striking achievement.
When the newscast cut back to Korostelev, an editor in the studio, whom Korostelev could hear in his earpiece, told him that the next segment was delayed. He had to fill more than a minute of airtime. Korostelev, wearing a yellow sweatshirt with a mike clipped to its collar, began plugging a tip line, which TV Rain had started for collecting first-hand accounts of the war; Groysman’s report had originated with a message sent to it. “If you have any tips or witness accounts to share about the draft and the conscripts’ experience in the armed forces and at the front line, and if you’d like to discuss the problems in the Russian military, then contact us,” he said. “We hope that we’ve been able to help many servicemen with their gear, for example, and basic necessities at the front, because the accounts that we have published and that have been shared by their relatives are frankly horrifying.”
Even as he heard the words coming out of his mouth, Korostelev wondered what had come over him. Help servicemen with their gear? Many of the people who had contacted the tip line were family members who said that their loved ones had been sent to Ukraine with little or no training, and without essential supplies such as thermal underwear, warm socks, or body armor. Korostelev had discovered that bringing attention to these reports often resulted in the men being withdrawn from frontline positions. He thought of this as one of his contributions to the antiwar effort: he was helping reduce the number of Russian fighters in Ukraine, one conscripted man at a time. He did not mean that TV Rain’s work had helped provide “basic necessities at the front.” But, somehow, he had said it.
In the first months of the war, Latvia issued about two hundred and sixty visas to media workers fleeing Russia, and nearly as many to their family members. Riga was already home to Meduza, arguably the most respected Russian-language news outlet. Now two dozen others came, including TV Rain, the Russian services of the BBC and Deutsche Welle, the Moscow bureau of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, several smaller publications, and about half the staff of Novaya Gazeta , whose editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, had received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021. The population of Riga is roughly six hundred thousand people, and that of all Latvia is fewer than two million, so five hundred newcomers is “a noticeable presence,” Viktors Makarovs, a senior foreign-ministry official, told me.
Latvia, like Lithuania and Estonia, was occupied by the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years. (All three countries joined the European Union in 2004.) About a quarter of the population are Russian-speaking ethnic Russians who settled there during the occupation and their descendants. Latvian authorities have long worried about the group’s susceptibility to Russian propaganda. A former President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, whose wife, Ieva, serves as the digital-media adviser to the President of Latvia, has been an outspoken proponent of sealing borders against all Russians, citing, among other things, “a deep skepticism about transforming Russians who come here into non-imperialist democrats.”
In Latvia, Anna Mongayt, TV Rain’s creative director, has felt a sense of discomfort and shame, for being from Russia, for speaking Russian in stores and restaurants. “I’m always wanting to explain myself,” she said.
The European Union spent much of last year devising ways to protect its media sphere from Russian interference. In Latvia, the measures were sweeping. The country banned the broadcast of some eighty television channels that were registered in Russia, and police cracked down on a black market for satellite receivers that were used to circumvent the restrictions. It was in this context that TV Rain arrived in Riga: it was welcomed as an antidote to the Kremlin’s propaganda, but it also encountered a distrustful public and a new set of laws and regulations that were enforced with existential urgency.
TV Rain, which is known as Dozhd in Russian, began broadcasting on Latvian cable last July—and almost immediately started racking up warnings and violations. Latvian authorities cited the station for failing to provide an audio track in Latvian, as required by law; for displaying a map of Russia that included the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula; and for its journalists’ repeated use of the phrase “our military” to refer to the Russian armed forces. Editors at TV Rain told me that an illustrator had turned in the map so late that no one had had a chance to check it, but that the use of “our military” was no mistake: it was an acknowledgment of responsibility. To some Latvians, however, it sounded like a statement of allegiance.
By the time of Korostelev’s broadcast, on Thursday, December 1st, TV Rain was facing thousands of euros in fines. The following day, a clip of his slipup spread on social media. It seemed like proof of something many in Latvia had suspected all along—even Russians who claimed to oppose the Kremlin were secretly supporting its war in Ukraine. “So it turns out this was all part of the ‘special operation,’ ” one typical tweet read. “This was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”