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.”
Ekaterina Kotrikadze, TV Rain’s news director, opened that afternoon’s broadcast of “Here and Now” with a clarification and an apology. “The phrase used by Korostelev was factually wrong and absolutely unacceptable to the entire editorial team of TV Rain,” she said. “We oppose Russia’s war in Ukraine. We consider this war to be criminal and vile, and we consider the draft criminal and senseless. Our goal is to get this message across to every single one of our viewers, to as many people as possible. We cannot allow wording that may cast doubt on our position, and for this reason”—Kotrikadze swallowed—“we have decided to stop working with Alexey Korostelev, starting today.” Her speech slowed and she appeared about to cry. “To all those people who have had to flee their homes, to all who have experienced Russian aggression firsthand,” she said, “we ask for your forgiveness.”
It was a flawless apology. But in the world of social media, as in the world of live television, everything is iterative. More clarifications and apologies followed—from TV Rain’s editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dzyadko, and its founder, Natalia Sindeeva—with each subsequent statement sounding less apologetic, more defensive. That afternoon, Korostelev posted on Telegram, “Do I feel sorry for hungry conscripts who have been abandoned by everyone? I do. Is Putin a great guy? He is not. This seems to be the waterline. Do I help the conscripts? Only by reporting on them.”
I visited TV Rain’s studio in Amsterdam in late November, both as a reporter and as an on-air guest. I chatted with the makeup artist working on me, a thirty-one-year-old named Anastasia Pyzhik. I asked her how long she had been in the Netherlands; when she told me that she’d been lucky enough to “have a car and some gas in the tank” in the first week of March, 2022, I realized that it wasn’t Russia she had left—it was Ukraine. Her parents were still in Odesa. Between Pyzhik’s busy schedule—TV Rain was just one of her clients—and the frequent blackouts in Odesa resulting from Russian air strikes, it was hard to talk on the phone with them more than once a week. I asked Pyzhik how she felt about working for a Russian television channel, expecting her to say that TV Rain was not like other Russian media, that the people she worked with opposed the war. Instead, she said, “I’m just here to make money. I’ve had to overcome many things in these last months. This is the least of it.”
TV Rain had a presence in Amsterdam because of one person: the Dutch media entrepreneur Derk Sauer, who moved from the Netherlands to the U.S.S.R. in 1989 to launch Moscow , an English-language glossy magazine about the Soviet capital that was modelled on New York. Sauer was a former radical student activist, a self-described Maoist turned war correspondent. Moscow folded after two years, but his next venture, an English-language newspaper called the Moscow Times , became one of the city’s most popular and reliable publications. In 2005, Sauer sold his company, whose holdings then included the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy , for a hundred and eighty million dollars. Still, he stayed in the country. A few years ago, at the age of sixty-four, he bought back the Moscow Times and turned it into a digital nonprofit. A Russian-language edition appeared in January of 2022, a month before the paper’s staff had to flee Russia. Sauer moved back to Amsterdam, where he hadn’t lived in thirty-three years.
Before leaving Moscow, Sauer persuaded the Dutch Embassy to issue visas to Russian journalists. About half of the Moscow Times’ twenty-five-person staff joined him in Amsterdam (the rest relocated to Armenia). The paper was cut off from the funding sources that it had relied on in Russia—advertising, subscriptions, events, and private donations—so Sauer proposed building a support network of independent Russian media, beginning with the Moscow Times , TV Rain, and Meduza. “Fund-raising is much easier if you come together,” he told me. The group has been able to secure significant funding from what Sauer called “international foundations.”
A Belgian media company offered to share its office space in Amsterdam. Sauer invited TV Rain to work out of the building, too. He envisioned it as a professional community center of sorts. “These journalists have been moving from one Airbnb to another,” he told me. “It’s so important for them to have a place to communicate with each other, to come up with ideas, and to party with each other.”
TV Rain has a small studio and an adjacent room full of desks. A kitchen, which doubles as the makeup studio, connects to the Moscow Times . When I visited, Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a weekly current-affairs program, was recording his show. I last saw Fishman on March 1, 2022, TV Rain’s final day of regular broadcasting from Moscow. Afterward, Fishman and his partner, the Ukrainian-born journalist Yulia Taratuta, fled Russia with their four-year-old daughter, were denied entry to Georgia, spent a few weeks in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and then several months in Israel before landing in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam studio had recently been outfitted with TV Rain’s signature pink lighting and a new anchor desk. Fishman hadn’t realized that the camera would now see his feet; his black suède shoes looked worn and comfortable but not exactly telegenic.
Fishman originally modelled his show on John Oliver’s: he is funny and knowledgeable, and he used his access to Kremlin insiders to mock Putinism. When the war began, he said, “it was time to stop laughing.” He has since started to doubt his own expertise. “One of the first statements I made on air when it began was ‘This is an unpopular war, and Putin has already lost,’ ” Fishman told me. “But the way the draft went down, the way people have submitted to it and gone to war when their chances of survival are less than fifty per cent—I mean, they are spending their own money on gear so they can be shipped off to be killed! I no longer understand.”
It’s increasingly difficult for Fishman to get anyone in Russia to speak on air—several of his regular contacts have been arrested—but when I was in the studio he was interviewing a Russian human-rights activist still working in the country. The conversation was peculiarly normal. Fishman’s reporting methods haven’t changed in exile, which makes his current feelings of disconnection all the more confusing to him. “In Moscow, I used to work from home, making calls and writing text messages, and going to the studio once a week to record the program,” he said. “Now I do the exact same thing—and yet I feel like I’ve lost touch.”
The media theorist Jay Rosen has written that the central claim to authority in journalism is being there—in the place of the action, where the reader or viewer is not. “Among the prerequisites for reporting to take its course is a shared world, a weave of common assumptions, connecting reporter to recipient,” Rosen has written. “If that breaks apart so does the possibility of there being any journalism.” In the absence of physical access to either side of the war, a sense of shared community with the audience is TV Rain’s only path to journalistic credibility. But what makes TV Rain able to speak to Russians in Russia is exactly what makes it suspect outside of Russia.
Galina Timchenko, who launched Meduza in 2014, pioneered the model of reporting from exile. Meduza’s technical and editorial staff worked out of Riga, while its journalists reported from Russia. That way, even if individual journalists sometimes faced intimidation and threats, the Kremlin could not persecute the publication itself. In 2019, one of Meduza’s reporters was arrested on trumped-up drug-possession charges, but he was released after a few days, following unprecedented protests.
When the war began, Meduza had to get its journalists out of Russia. Twenty-seven people, several dogs and cats, one parrot, and one pet rabbit went to Latvia—their Riga-based colleagues picked them up at the border. Twelve more people dispersed to other countries. But Meduza has still found a way to report from Russia, using what Timchenko has termed “proxy reporting.” Meduza assigns discreet information-gathering tasks to four or five different people on the ground; writers and editors in Riga then put the story together. “All our sources are now anonymous,” Timchenko told me, “and all our journalists are now anonymous.”
The view from TV Rain’s office in Riga.
Meduza’s readers in Russia have to use virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, to circumvent the Kremlin’s censorship. They read the publication for reporting on the war in Ukraine but also for practical information. After the draft began, in the fall, Meduza published a series of informational posts, with titles such as “How Not to End Up in the War” and “What Happens If You Fail to Report to the Recruiting Office.” “We came up with this tagline, that accurate information saves lives, but now it really does,” Timchenko told me. “We know there are millions of people in Russia who don’t like what’s going on. They are real people, and they are in pain, and we need to help them know what’s going on.”
Other journalists in exile said something similar. “Our short-term goal is to not let those who are inside and opposed to the war lose their minds,” Denis Kamalyagin, the editor of Pskovskaya Guberniya, a long-embattled independent regional newspaper, told me. Kamalyagin, who fled Russia after the police raided his office and his home, surprised me by saying that he understood the Latvians who regarded Russian journalists as a threat to their security. “Is Latvia supposed to be thrilled that we come here, bringing with us the Russian secret police, from which we are escaping?” he said. “What if they start killing us here?”
Many Russian journalists seem to have settled in central Riga, which is tiny and dense with Art Nouveau buildings. Svetlana Prokopieva, a forty-three-year-old reporter for Sever.Realii, a news project of Radio Liberty focussed on the northwest of Russia, lives in the resort town of Jurmala, steps from the calm gray expanse of the Baltic Sea. When we met, at a café in town, she told me that she had chosen to stay on the coast because she wanted to make the best of her exile. Back in Russia, police had shown up at her house in the countryside, thrown her to the floor, and handcuffed her; another group of police raided her apartment in the city of Pskov, where her husband was staying. “It was clear that this was just going to keep happening,” she said. Her husband is still in Pskov, less than two hundred miles away—the couple discusses the weather every day, Prokopieva said, “as though we were looking out the same window.”
Her mother is in Pskov, too. Prokopieva sometimes struggles to convince her that the war is actually happening; her mother watches Russian state television and tends to believe it, as do many of her elderly neighbors. “It doesn’t mean that they are monsters,” Prokopieva said. “It means that their consciousness is altered.”
Because these journalists’ outlets are blocked in Russia, tracking audience numbers is difficult. V.P.N. apps make it impossible to tell what country a reader or viewer is logging in from, much less to get an accurate count of individual visitors. But most of the audience—perhaps tens of millions of people a month—seems to be living in Russia. For TV Rain, the second-largest number of viewers is in Ukraine. “When we were bombing Odesa, we had a local journalist on the air,” Fishman said. “She told us that, afterward, she got recognized in the street.” I noticed that he said that “we” were bombing Odesa.
Timchenko told me that eight years of working in Latvia had changed her and her staff. Following a number of internal crises, Meduza instituted an ethics code, a conflict-resolution committee, and a mechanism for allowing everyone on staff to weigh in on editorial policy. The publication has a list of words that should not be used and ongoing debates about other words, such as whether Crimea should be described as having been “annexed” or “occupied.” “Such discussions seem extraneous, but they are essential,” Timchenko told me. Meduza’s first major misstep, she recalled, was the use of the word “ tyolochki ”—a rough equivalent of “chicks”—to refer to women, in a 2015 social-media post. “We had an editorial meeting that lasted four hours, and at the end realized that we are an international company and we have to apologize.”
Timchenko said that TV Rain should have put its operations on hold after leaving Moscow, and then relaunched as a Western European media company. But the need to leave Russia while continuing to cover the war had made any sort of pause an unimaginable luxury. This, in turn, had made TV Rain prone to the kind of misstep that now had it fighting for survival in Latvia.
By Monday, four days after Korostelev’s remarks, the TV Rain story was dominating Latvian television, including on TV3, a commercial channel that had been renting studio space to TV Rain. I watched that night’s broadcast of “Here and Now” with a dozen members of the staff, including Sonya Groysman, the correspondent who had been reporting on the atrocities committed by the 27th Motorized Rifle Brigade. Groysman had persuaded two more of its soldiers to talk about the torture of Ukrainian civilians. One of them, Ayaz Yakupov, spoke on camera. “They did whatever they wanted with civilians,” he said of his colleagues. “They made them hold a hand grenade with the ring removed.” In the control room, a split screen showed TV Rain’s newscast, live from the studio, and TV3’s prerecorded program, with the TV Rain controversy as its lead story.
At one point, Anna Mongayt, TV Rain’s creative director and that night’s host, said of Groysman’s source, “He must certainly be headed for trial.” Groysman cringed. Such commentary would make it harder for her to get soldiers to speak in the future, but she understood that Mongayt was attempting to repair TV Rain’s reputation. “I wish we could be asking big questions about journalism,” Groysman told me. “But all we are ever doing is struggling to survive.”
The last part of the broadcast was another non-apology apology from Sindeeva, TV Rain’s owner. “Can one feel sympathy for the conscripts?” Sindeeva said. “Everyone decides for themselves. I know I do.” A producer near me let out an exasperated sigh.
Mongayt, who was wearing a tight silver dress, left the studio around nine o’clock. She looked exhausted. She, her husband, and their two school-age sons had spent the last nine months living in exile, first in Georgia and then in Riga. After arriving in Latvia, she learned that most local families had been affected by mass deportations carried out during the Soviet occupation. She had come to feel a constant 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. “To tell people around me that I have nothing to do with the state that’s waging this war—not the country itself but its government.”
Two weeks earlier, the Kremlin had branded Mongayt a “foreign agent,” a punitive designation applied to about two hundred and fifty individuals who annoy the Russian government. Both of Mongayt’s parents are prominent figures in Moscow. Her father is a media executive, and her mother is the head of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. But Mongayt spent the first nine years of her life in Odesa, and still deeply identifies with Ukraine. The war, she told me, had felt “like an autoimmune illness, like one part of your body is attacking another.”
Odesa had been shelled that day, and Mongayt had asked some of her friends to come on air to talk about it, but the city had no electricity. “And I know that, as a Russian citizen, I will never be able to go back there, will never again visit my grandparents’ graves,” she said. “It’s like Odesa is a different planet, and rockets no longer go there.” She caught herself. “Except artillery rockets.”
Mongayt is not the only senior TV Rain executive for whom identifying as Russian is a conscious choice. Ekaterina Kotrikadze, the news director, is Georgian. When she was ten, her mother, a nuclear physicist, decided to leave Tbilisi, which had been devastated by civil war, and move to Moscow. In 1999, their Moscow apartment building was destroyed by an explosion. Kotrikadze, who was then fifteen, was in Georgia visiting relatives; her mother’s body was never found. The Russian government blamed the explosion on Chechen terrorists, a security threat that Vladimir Putin, who was then Prime Minister, seized upon in his campaign for the Presidency. Independent investigations have suggested that the Russian secret police may have been involved.
After college, Kotrikadze moved back to Georgia to work as a journalist, then to New York to join a Russian-language broadcasting network. In 2019, she married Tikhon Dzyadko, who was a deputy at the network, and followed him to Moscow, where they both went to work for TV Rain. Dzyadko, now the station’s editor-in-chief, comes from a family of dissidents. His grandparents were political prisoners who were freed by Mikhail Gorbachev; his mother is a human-rights activist and journalist still working in Moscow. In Soviet Russia and Putin’s Russia, Dzyadko and his family were pariahs, but to Latvians he, like Kotrikadze, is simply Russian. “I have always known that I was Georgian,” Kotrikadze said. “But now, when journalists ask me who I am, I tell them that I’m a Russian journalist.” She and Dzyadko had both recently been designated “foreign agents” by the Kremlin. Kotrikadze told me, “I felt that I had finally been recognized as a real Russian citizen.”
The next morning, December 6th, the National Electronic Mass Media Council of Latvia convened to discuss the case of TV Rain. In the past, the station’s executives had been invited to attend such sessions. This time, the council met behind closed doors, and by 9 A.M. had announced its decision: TV Rain was “a threat to national security,” and its broadcast license would be revoked. Cable providers in Latvia had forty-eight hours to drop TV Rain—a loss of audience and some revenue for the station, but not a mortal blow. The decision also meant that TV Rain employees, most of whom had entered the country on one-year visas, would be unlikely to obtain more permanent status.
TV Rain shared studio space with TV3, a commercial channel.
“I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be an outcast,” Valeria Ratnikova, a twenty-three-year-old news anchor, told me. I’d last seen her the previous spring, just after she left Russia; I’d sat next to her at a café in Istanbul as she told her parents, in Moscow, that she would not be returning. From Istanbul, she went to Tbilisi, then to Riga. Now she would likely have to move again. “At least I don’t have to pack on an hour’s notice,” she said. “It’s been great to be able just to go to work and come home, and not worry every day that your apartment is going to get raided.”
This sense of safety came with a dose of discomfort: compared with the millions of displaced Ukrainians, not to mention the millions in cities shelled by the Russian military, Ratnikova was privileged. “I have felt I have no right to complain,” she told me. She thought a lot about another kind of privilege, too: Ratnikova has interviewed the wives and sisters of conscripts; she could imagine being one of them, had she been born in a different family and in a different city. “I see them as people, people who have never experienced anything good in life,” she said. “Sure, there are some monsters among the conscripts. But many of them don’t even realize that they’re being taken to kill Ukrainians. This is no justification—as soon as they fire their first shot, there can be no forgiveness—but to me they are people, not orcs.” (Orcs, the name of a population of malevolent creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, is the term Ukrainians have popularly adopted for Russian troops.)
Identifying with your subject and your audience is, under normal circumstances, one of the essential elements of journalism. Kotrikadze told me that TV Rain’s troubles in Latvia “happened because we still own our sense of belonging to Russia.” We were in a small conference room, where none of the more junior staff members could see her. Kotrikadze started to cry—and immediately stopped herself. “Why am I crying?” she said. “We are fine.”
She meant that her city wasn’t being shelled and her loved ones hadn’t been killed—a litany that, a year into the war, no longer required articulation. Russian journalists in exile are constantly aware that they are lucky to have fled for fear of arrest and not in fear for their lives. They are lucky to know that their apartment buildings back home are intact, even if they can’t return to them. They are lucky to be able to talk on the phone to their parents or siblings, who have electricity and don’t need to shelter in basements. Kotrikadze resolved that in her weekly international-affairs show, which would air that night, she would not discuss TV Rain; she would focus, as she had for months, on Ukraine.
Since the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea, TV Rain reporters and producers have spent a tremendous amount of time building relationships with Ukrainian sources. Now the biggest worry in the newsroom—more immediate than the worry about moving again—was that Ukrainians would stop speaking to them. A number of frequent guests had turned down requests to appear on TV Rain as a result of the controversy. Kotrikadze read out one response: “I’m sorry, but I’m in the process of moving to Italy for the winter.” Dzyadko, seated across from her, said, “We are in the process of moving, too—we just don’t know where we are going. Sorry. Just kidding.”
Less than an hour later, the newsroom went quiet. The nearly two dozen staff members present saw the same thing come across their screens. Sindeeva, the TV Rain founder and owner, had posted a video on her personal Telegram channel, tearfully confessing that she regretted the decision to fire Korostelev. This, as the staff came to learn, was the moment that the station lost access to officials in the administration of Volodymyr Zelensky. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, called Sindeeva’s video message “a mockery made all the worse by the fact that we used to trust them.”
Kotrikadze was still on the air when Dzyadko and a couple of other staff members got in a cab and headed to his and Kotrikadze’s apartment, in central Riga; Dzyadko had to relieve the nanny watching their two sons, aged two and eight. He stopped at a wine store near his building and picked up a dozen bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. “I’ll pay for this out of the corporate budget,” he said, waving off one of the reporters with him. “We were planning to have an office holiday party, so we’ll spring for a wake instead.”
About half of the Riga-based staff eventually gathered in Dzyadko and Kotrikadze’s living room. Timchenko, the publisher of Meduza, arrived, having flown back from Berlin, where her publication is establishing an office. The living room was large and airy, with blank white walls. A small pen-and-ink drawing of the Dzyadko family dacha outside of Moscow was propped against a window. A bookcase was half full. Familiar Ikea furniture—a wooden dining table, a plush armchair—shared the room with an open gym bag and a pile of clean laundry. One or two young reporters were smoking in the kitchen. Dzyadko and Kotrikadze’s eight-year-old son came in and out, and no one told him to go to bed. At two in the morning, when almost everyone seemed to be drunk and repeating themselves, I left. In the doorway, I bumped into Andrei Goryanov, a journalist I knew from Moscow. “I’m the head of the BBC Russian Service in exile,” he said, with a laugh that indicated the slight absurdity of his position.
The following Friday, the leaders of Latvian N.G.O.s that had been helping Russian journalists hosted a press conference. More than fifty reporters crowded into an event space on the top floor of a Marriott Hotel. It was a sunny, freezing day in snow-covered Riga, but sweltering inside the glassed-in room. Dzyadko, who is strikingly tall and thin, looked even more pale and gaunt than usual. He had spent the past week on talk shows and panels, trying to defend TV Rain and its staff, with little effect.
Seated beside him was Sabine Sile, the former head of the media-studies department at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. In the spring of last year, she had created a co-working space, with desks, computers, sound-recording studios, and a kitchen, for Russian journalists in exile. She talked about how she’d helped Russian journalists open bank accounts and get cell-phone contracts. She said that some had arrived with one hastily packed bag, that many of them needed to find schools for their kids and psychotherapists for themselves. “And we expect these people, while they are experiencing all of this, while they are also unable to stop work, to be heroes, to continue fighting against the war, and to make no mistakes,” she said. “I propose we see each other as humans. We have common values, and they are the only things that will make it possible for us to survive this war.”
As Sile spoke, the color seemed slowly to return to Dzyadko’s face. Sile had grown so frustrated with Latvian authorities that she was beginning to think TV Rain’s journalists might need to find another country to host them. “Maybe we just don’t have what it takes to keep them safe here,” she said. But, she went on, many of them don’t have enough money to pay bills, let alone buy plane tickets, and moving again would be re-traumatizing for them and their children. “If we have a problem, we cannot push it on someone else,” she said. “We have to solve it in Latvia ourselves.”
TV Rain had settled into a familiar state of uncertainty. The team continued to work, as it had through a multitude of crises back in Russia, broadcasting on YouTube and on its Web site. Korostelev was banned from Latvia. Some of his colleagues feared that they would soon be deported. At the time, people close to the government told me that there was no political will to enable TV Rain staff members to secure more permanent legal status in Latvia. Some of their visas were set to expire in the spring. Dzyadko brushed off these concerns: “That’s still months away! We just need to keep working.”
Three days later, TV Rain learned that it was losing its office and studio space in Riga. By then, Dzyadko was in the Netherlands, meeting with Sauer. Sauer made the case for moving the entire operation to Amsterdam. It was more expensive than Riga, and harder for Russian speakers to navigate, but its residents were also less afraid of Russia, less suspicious of Russians, and proud of its nickname, City of Freedom. The mayor, the Dutch foreign minister, and the state secretary for culture and media had all visited Sauer’s space and listened to him outline his vision for a Russian independent-media community.
On December 22nd, TV Rain was granted a Dutch broadcasting license. Dzyadko received a work visa to the Netherlands. He and Kotrikadze would soon be moving to Amsterdam, along with a number of other TV Rain staffers. It would be their third city since TV Rain left Russia, last March. Kids would change schools again. Family photographs would be propped up on new windowsills. But TV Rain’s journalists would have jobs and electricity and heat. They would keep reminding themselves that they are the lucky ones. ♦
TV Rain’s reporters and producers often improvise studio spaces.
The biggest worry in the newsroom was that Ukrainians would stop speaking to them.
The New Yorker · by Masha Gessen · March 6, 2023
