Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine has significantly reshaped the production of public knowledge about Russia. This applies both to knowledge production within the country – now constrained by new repressive laws – and abroad, where the greatest challenge is obtaining reliable and high-quality information about what is happening inside the country.
The Russian media in exile include hundreds of media professionals who fled the country due to rapidly escalating risks after the invasion and continue their work from abroad. They are the core actors producing knowledge on contemporary Russia and providing an alternative narrative to Kremlin propaganda. Beyond journalism, these media organisations engage in data collection, human rights work, education and more. Esther and Thomas (2024) describe this kind of journalism as “journalism in another form,” meaning that while journalists remain committed to the principles and values of Western normative journalism, the realities of working in exile deeply influence how their newsrooms operate in practice. Several factors are playing a crucial role here, including precarious working conditions, unstable donor-based funding, the risk of transnational repressions and the challenging experience of exile. For Russian journalists, an additional challenge is their association with the aggressor state and the constant need to prove that they are the “good Russians”.
Access to information within Russia remains a valuable resource and simultaneously a pressing challenge for exiled media actors. Proximity to events is a fundamental element of journalism and a key factor in the symbolic power of the media to set the agenda.
Newsrooms are in constant search of authors for on-the-ground reporting from Russia. A recent scandal involving a contributor allegedly fabricating many of her reports has not only damaged the credibility of exiled media, it has underscored the challenge of fact-checking reporting from inside the country. Beyond that, it has highlighted a deeper issue: the tendency of exiled outlets to expect Russia-based reporters to produce a particular kind of content – one that exclusively depicts the country in the bleakest terms, stripping away nuance and contradiction. As a result, the gap between lived reality in Russia and the version of reality curated by exiled Russian journalists – who act as gatekeepers – continues to widen.
The fees the exiled outlets can afford to pay to their colleagues inside the country are often disproportionate to the time, effort, and risks they undertake. Most of these contributors publish their work under pseudonyms, often having to hide their real names that they had worked had to establish, while in many cases the materials are published without a byline altogether. There is also a broader ethical tension between those who have left Russia and those who have stayed. Russian journalists and writers who remain in the country and strive to continue their work in independent, critical journalism are effectively left without a voice. The voice of “independent Russian journalism” now largely belongs to major exiled newsrooms.
Similar dynamics can be observed in academia and the activism and human rights spheres. While the importance of security and the risks of criticising Putin’s regime cannot be overstated, it is crucial that security protocols and discourse do not turn engagement with actors inside Russia into a form of knowledge and data extractivism. Instead, fair and equitable conditions must be maintained for all participants.