In April 2025, Kommersant journalist Alexander Chernykh declined the most prestigious independent prize recognizing Russian journalism, Redkollegia. He’d won the award for a report from Russia’s Kursk region, which had recently spent more than seven months under partial Ukrainian occupation. In a statement explaining his decision, Chernykh — who regularly reports from the Russian side of the front line, a zone legally off-limits to exiled media — criticized the award’s jury for what he sees as its obvious partiality towards outlets operating outside of Russia. The distinction between “independent” and “censored” outlets, he argued, downplays the work of journalists who continue to report from within Russia.

His refusal highlighted the deepening divide between those who have left the country and those who stayed behind. Inside Russia, journalists carry on working — risking arrest, surveillance, and the safety of their families, or navigating the shifting boundaries of state censorship. Meduza spoke with several of them about the constraints they face, the stories they can no longer tell, and how they view their colleagues in exile.

Anna

Freelance reporter from eastern Russia who worked in a regional media outlet before the full-scale war

After the war began, I stayed in my job at an official media outlet [Editor’s note: one that complied with Russian military censorship] for another eight months. Though I’m not even sure it counts as work: I just sat there all day, staring at the screen. And when it went dark, I would move the mouse to wake it up again. But at least there was no self-censorship.

When obituaries [for Russian soldiers] came in, I would scrub out all the usual lines like “he heroically died a hero.” But I made sure to add things like “He died very young,” or “He left behind many children.” I tried to write like a human being — with subtext. It felt like my own quiet form of resistance.

Later, the outlet signed contracts with the [regional] government to “support the special military operation” — meaning we had to post banners about how great it is to sign a military contract. I said I wasn’t going to do it. [Editor’s note: posting the banners was part of Anna’s official professional duties.] My boss replied, “Then don’t do it yourself — have one of the junior girls do it.” But that wasn’t the point. It’s not about whose hands do it!

I couldn’t keep working at a censored media outlet during the war. I won’t judge those who stayed, but I couldn’t do it. And really, what can you even say under censorship? I quit — the only one on my team to do so, even though my colleagues were also against the war. I started freelancing for independent outlets. I went to Kursk to report on refugees after part of the region was occupied by Ukrainian forces — completely on my own.

It turned out that you don’t need to hide behind an official media agency, or get a newsroom's permission, or make compromises [Editor’s note: The Russian authorities have made it illegal to work with many exiled media outlets]. On the other hand, after years in the profession, I was used to filing an official request and getting a response. Now I was publishing anonymously, and my name just vanished. I’d call people and use a pseudonym, and I kept forgetting what name I was supposed to use. People stopped answering. They would yell at me, hang up on me. “You’re an enemy of the state!” A whole workday could pass with nobody speaking to you. And it wasn’t just one day — it turned into months.

Now I realize I shouldn’t have agreed to work anonymously. [In our region,] everyone knows perfectly well who’s behind those stories, whether your real name is on them or not. And by hiding, I just lost myself. You spend your whole life identifying through your profession — you don’t have any hobbies. And then suddenly, you’re anonymous. It’s a hard thing to go through.

This job requires so much empathy. Sure, sometimes you’re writing about people who aren’t the best, but you still listen to them and feel for them — or at least for their families, their kids, their wives. That’s normal. But when all your empathy goes outward, there’s nothing left for yourself. At some point, I started falling apart physically. I was completely drained. I felt awful, gained a lot of weight, became this mushy version of myself — like overcooked porridge.

And at the same time, these little warning signals started coming from all sides. My husband’s boss hinted that maybe he’d have to be let go — “because your wife is involved in some questionable stuff.” A friend got drunk with him and said, “They’re saying something might happen to your wife soon.” Nothing ever happened outright — but every couple of months, something like that would reach us. Rotten, vague conversations.

The fear, the exhaustion, the sense of failure — it all builds up. And eventually, it spills over. At the start of the invasion, it felt like it would all be over soon — tomorrow, the day after. So there was still a reason to work, to take risks, to try to get the truth out. We thought that if we just wrote enough about this unthinkable war, it might stop. But with each piece, that hope felt more and more absurd. You’re constantly worried about your safety, your loved ones — and on top of all that risk, you see no result. I kept trying to push through, but eventually it stopped working. So I quit. Just recently.

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The absurd thing is, not even a week after I quit, my husband failed a security screening at his new state-affiliated job. Because of me. They just fired him. “Your wife is involved in bad things — why is she writing awful stuff about our country?” And the security service showed him they knew exactly where I’d been, and what I’d done, hour by hour. “Why was she conducting interviews in the park that later appeared in hostile media?” The surveillance is extremely effective. Down to the dates and times. There’s no such thing as safety — not real safety. Only the appearance of it.

And then I’d sit in on yet another [online] safety training [for journalists], listening to exiles telling me how important it is to “follow safety protocols” — and it would drive me up the wall. Sometimes I’d have meltdowns. Because, honestly, what safety are they even talking about? I live in a small region. My stories come from here. I drive my own car. There are a million surveillance cameras everywhere — and people seriously think no one knows where these stories are coming from? It’s laughable. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to engage. I don’t want to sit through any more of these pointless training sessions. I don’t want to keep taking risks. I don’t want to put my family in danger.

There’s this growing disconnect [between exiled journalists and those who stayed]. A deep one. I don’t even know how to explain it. Like that safety training, for example: it was scheduled for a time that suited the speakers. They’re all based in places like Riga. When it’s daytime for them, it’s night for me. Still, I pulled myself together and joined the session. And then I hear: “We appreciate you so much! You’re the ones staying behind and gathering the information that we work with!” But if we’re really so important, couldn’t they at least have held it a bit earlier?

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My impression is that the people abroad are still living normal lives. And from there, they lecture you about safety. Sure, I get it — they’re fulfilling grant requirements. But that’s not the same as caring. Don’t give me these grand speeches about how much we matter to you. That’s what really got to me. It felt cynical.

Honestly, the biggest divide isn’t even between those who left and those who stayed. It’s between the big cities and the rest of Russia — the small towns and rural areas. That divide is the deepest of all. And there’s no bridging it. You see it reflected in the media, too. Whether they left or stayed, most Russian outlets are still writing for a handful of urban readers — the supposed middle class, some of whom are now in exile. But the rest of the country isn’t being reached.

I’ve traveled a lot to the countryside. And at every funeral or memorial for a fallen soldier, it's always the same — crushing poverty. Families living in misery. It felt like something out of a [Vasily] Sigarev film. Most of what we publish just isn’t for them. They’re busy trying to survive.

We go around nursing our traumas, but most Russians don’t care. People don’t read anything. Out in the regions, they’ve never even heard of any media outlet beyond [state propaganda channels] Channel One and Rossiya-1 on TV. And if all the independent outlets vanished tomorrow, no one would notice.

Darya

Journalist at a large regional media outlet

I wouldn’t say Russian journalists have spent the past three years living under the sword of censorship. We’re still able to write — that’s why we’ve stayed. Of course, the work isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean our stories get blocked all the time. I’ve been able to report on the lives of people involved in the “special military operation,” on the tensions between returning soldiers and civilians, on problems with payments, and on the difficulties veterans face trying to adjust. We’ve covered cases where people come back from the front and slip into crime, committing terrible acts. We sit through those court hearings — well, we did, while they were still open.

I was able to cover the mobilization, too. I traveled around the region, gathered facts, checked them, and talked to conscription officials. Because when the mobilization was first announced, everyone was stunned — journalists and officials alike. And somehow, together, we tried to figure out what was going on and what to do about it. The institutions were open to that kind of dialogue. We managed to keep young guys with serious health issues from being sent to the front. We captured people’s first raw reactions.

We write about everything — just carefully, because we’re trying to protect our sources and our team. We don’t want to be shut down. Never once has some officer come in and told us, “You can’t write that." A lot of it comes down to the fact that we figured out the rules of the game pretty quickly. We learned what’s allowed and what isn’t — and we now run all our editorial content through legal review. The lawyers cut out anything that might be seen as directly or indirectly “discrediting the army.” Or anything that might reveal troop locations — that kind of redacting happens everywhere, not just in Russia.

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And it doesn’t hurt the stories. Our readers understand the context perfectly well. From my perspective as a special correspondent, it doesn’t feel like censorship — it’s more like a kind of unspoken limitation that doesn’t really distort the big picture. It’s all clear anyway.

I figured out pretty fast how to preserve what matters in a piece without crossing any legal lines. Almost painlessly. A lot of it comes down to wording — for example, you can turn a statement that would violate the law into a possibility: instead of “it happened,” say “it may have happened.” Our edits are cautious: we keep as much natural speech as the law allows. We can’t use the video appeals soldiers record at the front — because you can’t verify where the video came from or who’s in it. We also haven’t managed to write about cases of self-harm, or suicides of veterans who were tortured in Ukrainian captivity. That was mostly in the first year and a half of the war, when there still wasn’t a proper system of psychological support.

At first, I’ll admit, it felt painful — professionally — to know that not all the material I’d worked so hard to collect would make it into the piece. You spend time building trust, and then the person finally opens up, their words start pouring out like a flood, describing all the blood and horror. And you want to fit it all in, so that through your story, that horror splashes over as many readers as possible… But that was my first reaction — maybe a bit childish, definitely emotional. That frustration faded fast. I realized I could work under these conditions.

One time, they cut a quote from a woman describing how her husband died. It was incredibly raw — how they pulled him out, tried to save him. But there were spots in there that risked “discrediting” the army” — for instance, saying they’d “sent them alone into the assault.” I argued for keeping it, but the lawyers insisted. And later I realized myself that there was no need to fight for specific phrases — the horror came through anyway. Besides, how can you write something like that if you weren’t there, if you have no proof of the command’s actions? People often have PTSD — they remember everything in fragments.

Not all facts are created equal. Since the start of the war, we’ve ramped up our fact-checking, because people — soldiers, relatives — often exaggerate or misremember. And really, what do we actually know about this war? Honestly? Nothing. So I became obsessive about verifying every detail, every story — mainly to make sure they could stay in the piece. My goal isn’t to soften things for the sake of censorship — it’s to avoid telling lies. That’s still the most important journalistic skill.

At some point, it stopped making sense to spell out in every article who started the war. And I didn’t want to take on the responsibility of making people feel guilty. Not because I don’t care — because that’s the choice I made when I decided to stay and keep working in my country. I’m not someone who believes the war “isn't so black and white,” but after meeting people who’ve come back from the front, I no longer feel like I have the right to draw clear moral lines.

There’s less hysteria now. Things have settled. Systems have been put in place. There’s a foundation now — “Defenders of the Fatherland” — that really does help the families of the dead, disabled soldiers. The panicked tone that dominated the early months of the “special military operation” is gone. Not because it’s all become routine and people just moved on, but because support and adaptation systems have been built. They don’t always work — but they do work.

I’ve stopped reading émigré media so much, because there’s a lot of hysteria in the tone. I don’t like those dramatic openers like “Putin is waging war” — they distract from the actual story. Words like “captured,” “annexed” — they turn me off on a human level. What I want to see in a story isn’t the journalist’s position, but the pain of the people they’re writing about.

When you live in Russia, that kind of moral certainty can feel like a slap in the face. There’s no need to rub salt in the reader’s wounds or turn them against the world. You can write in a way that still leaves people with hope. So they can see how to help. Or realize that just because the country’s leader hasn’t changed in a long time doesn’t mean they’ve done something wrong.

After three years of war, most people in Russia know someone affected by it — family, friends, acquaintances. It’s all around you. And this unimaginable stress — the idea that “Russians have occupied everything in the world” — just doesn’t stick anymore. That’s why people have stopped reading the media we used to rely on.

As for self-censorship, I’d already developed it long before the war, back in 2017–2018, during the protests. Something shifted in the media space back then, and I quickly realized it sometimes made sense to be less direct. I came to terms with that. At first, we had to get our protest reports confirmed by the authorities. Even if you were there and saw it with your own eyes. Then COVID came, and again, you couldn’t say anything without an official comment.

This all started happening to us well before the war. I’ve accepted it as a fact of life and don’t feel like a hostage. I can still write about anything — just carefully. And for me, that’s not about supporting the government, it’s a kind of social contract: you treat certain stories carefully not because someone told you to, but because you’re protecting the people in them.

When mobilization began and I saw all those confused people — those early volunteers — something shifted in me. I realized that yes, this is my role now: to hand them the megaphone and protect them however I can.

There’s still humanity on the Russian side. It’s about giving people the space to stay silent, if that’s what they need.

Mikhail

Journalist at a national business outlet

The first thing I saw in the office on February 24, 2022, was my editor’s pale face. He told me, “Roskomnadzor [Russia’s federal censorship agency] has been on our backs since early morning, and the editor-in-chief has already come by six times.”

In the first week of the invasion, our newsroom made a decision: the war was not going to be our story. We didn’t care about battles for Ukrainian villages — we cared about the ruble exchange rate. Our audience was made up of entrepreneurs, decision-makers, and corporate managers just trying to get on with their lives. Why tell people about Kupyansk when they’re dealing with completely different challenges?

Before the invasion, I was mostly writing lively pieces about international relations. When there was an election somewhere, I’d call up contacts and ask, “If this candidate wins, what will it mean for relations with Russia?” But once the war started, those questions stopped making sense — most countries’ relationships with Russia became clear-cut. No intrigue. Questions like “What difference will the new U.K. ambassador to Moscow make?” simply disappeared.

So I switched to covering the economy. That was my first step toward escapism. Inflation, the ruble, the key interest rate — one record low after another. On top of that, a mountain of sanctions, and a whole wave of business owners trying to find workarounds. Luckily, neither the Central Bank nor the Finance Ministry seemed to care what the media wrote about them. We never got a single call or complaint — not from [Central Bank Governor Elvira] Nabiullina, not from [Finance Minister Anton] Siluanov, not from [Defense Minister Andrey] Belousov, or whoever was steering the economic policy at the time. It felt like a safe harbor.

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Though at one point, we quoted a “foreign agent” in a piece, and the editor-in-chief came straight to us. He said the comment “added no value” and that “the source clearly didn’t know what they were talking about.” I asked him directly: is there an actual ban on quoting “foreign agents?” “No,” he said, “there’s no ban.” Management is just afraid to admit how little control they have left.

But sometimes I’d read the political desk’s stories and feel my eyebrows hit the back of my head. It was like they were living in a different universe. They’d run columns saying things like “It’s been a successful year — the Russian army crushed the enemy on all fronts.” Not a single word about the Kursk region.

The worst day was when Navalny was killed. I remembered how we’d covered his poisoning, his return to Russia. But the day he died… calling what we published that day “coverage” was a bit of a stretch. We did maybe five percent of what we could have done. It was obvious this was the top story. I went to the editor-in-chief: “Here’s one option, here’s another — we’re not breaking any laws, so what’s the problem?” His reply was basically, “There’s nothing we can do. The market’s shit. The profession’s ruined. We’ve screwed up this country.”

And yet someone still managed to publish a piece about demand for river cruises that day. That’s when I realized: there’s very little I can actually change. Deep down, you’re shouting, “Colleagues, wake up — this isn’t the time for feel-good features!” But in the end, you learn you’re only responsible for what goes out under your own name. You’re not protecting the brand anymore — you’re protecting yourself.

And then people stop talking to you. Here’s how it works now: a drone hits an oil refinery, we manage to reach someone who lives nearby and sees the fire from their window — and they refuse to talk. “Yeah, I see the flames, but please leave me out of it.”

The [censorship] limits are set by our outlet’s management, and at first, I naively thought I could push back. Turns out, management makes promises to the people at the top about what they won’t report on, and then can’t walk it back. Sometimes I argue with my editor, not to win, but just so the higher-ups don’t think everything’s going to slide through quietly. Picking that fight is stupid, but not picking it is shameful. I’ve decided I’d rather be stupid than ashamed.

Sometimes someone from management gets their head chewed off, but that doesn’t always trickle down to the newsroom. There are writers, editors, the editor-in-chief, and shareholders. I have no idea who’s calling whom in that chain, but all we usually hear is the echo. Roskomnadzor doesn’t usually call journalists directly. The moment they see something off, they assume there are shadowy figures behind the scenes at the business outlet trying to play their own game — and they go straight to the “decision-making center.” Reporters aren’t viewed as decision-makers.

I also write for exile media. Sometimes their editors come to me with an agenda. For example, they’ll find stats on household debt and say, “Let’s write that all Russians are drowning in debt. I mean, things are a total mess, right?” But staying in Russia, I can talk to real economists who know their stuff. I explain that yes, the stats are real — but this looks like nominal growth, that’s just a seasonal fluctuation, nothing dramatic’s actually happening. I turn in a sober, balanced article — and they publish it without fuss. In that sense, the experience has been surprisingly decent.

I’ve made my choice. It’s based on comfort, not having to pay rent, feeling financially secure. On February 24, my girlfriend and I talked about whether we should emigrate. Then we discussed it again when the mobilization started. But I was exempt as a media worker, so I wasn’t worried. Honestly, I like living in Russia.

Interviews by Lilia Yapparova

Photos in collages: AP / Scanpix / LETA; EPA / Scanpix / LETA; Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Scanpix / LETA; Dmitry Lovetsky / AP / Scanpix / LETA; Ilya Pitalyev / RIA Novosti / Sputnik / IMAGO / SNA / Scanpix / LETA; Sergey Ilnitsky / EPA / Scanpix / LETA