How independent Russian media cover civic activism in wartime

Alongside free press, protests and civic activism in Russia have been facing increasing repression in the last years. They intensified significantly with the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when Russian authorities started detaining people for even just standing on the street with a white piece of paper. 

Although state and pro-Kremlin Russian media tends to ignore any civic opposition to the official Kremlin agenda, several media organisations remain that keep covering such events in great detail. You can find their reporting on Telegram, one of the rare social media sources that has not yet been banned in Russia. It remains a straightforward-to-use platform for livestreams and speedy reporting, one where independent publishers have the most following. 

The Fix looked into three media projects that cover Russian civic activism during the war – Sota, AvtoZak LIVE and OVD-Info. 

“Everything was clear enough in advance”

“I can’t say that February 24 [the date when Russia started an all-out invasion of Ukraine] affected our work much. It simply intensified some ongoing processes in Russia, such as censorship, pressure on independent media. Everything was clear enough in advance,” says Alexei Obukhov, editor at Sota, a Russian media outlet that focuses on civic society and human rights issues, or, as Obukhov puts it, the “degradation of the modern Russian state”.

Already a couple of months before the war started, Sota decided to remove bylines of its journalists from its materials, as the authors on multiple occasions had gotten detained close to home on the day they were about to go cover an event.  Taking this measure does not mean that detentions of journalists ceased; in fact, only recently the Russian security forces broke down the door to the apartment of one of Sota’s correspondents, Viktoria Arefieva, and detained her for two days on the pretention that she was involved in “telephone terrorism”. Still, “the less the state knows about you, the better,” says Obukhov. 

To have a predominantly Telegram presence is a strategy Sota had from its conception in 2020 in the wake of the anti-government protests in Belarus, when it “became clear” that the media censorship from Belarus will “soon come to Russia”, says Obukhov. Developing a website and thinking about how to boost its presence through news aggregators therefore became, as Obukhov puts it, “quite pointless”. As of mid-October, Sota has over 93,000 subscribers on its main Telegram channel.

Despite already exercising cautious action, the war still forced Sota to take up some additional measures. The “most painful”, according to Obukhov, was the decision taken after the introduction the new law about discrediting the Russian army in early March, namely to adjust Sota’s coverage to focus on Russian society’s reaction to the war, that is, to report only about rallies, persecutions, events Sota’s reporters can verify “with their own eyes”, rather than to write about the war itself. “If we write about the terror in Bucha, it is clear that they will come after all of us the next morning,” Obukhov said. “Thank God the war in Ukraine is covered in detail by many other publications.”

The caution taken is of even greater importance because most of the staff remains reporting in Russia. Only some editors, including Obukhov, have left Russia, as well as the male members of the team who, after mobilisation had been announced in September, faced the danger of getting drafted to the Russian army. “We have recently tried to allocate some work to the female part of the team, which is not threatened with the mobilisation,” Obukhov adds. 

Taking a risk of becoming a witness to a “crime” – an anti-war picket

Avtozak LIVE is a Telegram channel that was created in 2019 amidst the rallies in support of Ivan Golunov, Meduza’s reporter who became a victim of fabricated drug charges due to his investigative reporting. The channel gained prominence thanks to its fast coverage of massive actions with short video clips and captions. Today, it has over 51,000 subscribers.

Like Sota, Avtozak LIVE does not cover the war itself but the Russian society’s reaction to it, with one major difference: they have almost no field reporters left in Russia. 

“I was filming pickets where people wrote things that were against the law,” says Vitaly Malyshev, Avtozak’s sub-editor and former correspondent, about covering anti-war protests in early spring. “I was taking the risk of becoming a witness to the crime, and witnesses in Russia are often searched. Because of this, it was of course somewhat scary and sooner or later I had to leave.” He left Russia in May. Those reporters who remain in Russia are very cautious to not touch the topic of war, Malyshev adds. 

On 21 September, the day Vladimir Putin announced the mobilisation, it was the first time Avtozak LIVE covered a bigger rally without any correspondents on the ground. It nevertheless still succeeded in keeping a detailed coverage of the event thanks to the clips and photos sent by followers and reports from other independent media outlets. 

Malyshev says that for him, covering protests from afar does not represent a major difficulty: it is often immediately clear from the video where and when the rally is taking place, and the rallies are rarely similar to each other. There is also an element of trust that the follower sent them a video clip from a rally from that day, he adds.

Supporting new initiatives in expectation of the worst

As for Sota, repressions were no news for OVD-Info, either. The human rights media project, established in 2011 to combat political repression in Russia with legal assistance and reporting, was already designated a foreign agent in October 2021. The project’s website was blocked by the Russian censorship agency by the end of that year. 

This is one of the reasons why they are these days present mainly on Telegram, and on two additional websites which have not yet been blocked in Russia, says OVD-Info’s campaign manager Dmitry Anisimov. The channel has 189,000 subscribers as of now.

Due to safety reasons Anisimov does not want to comment on the whereabouts of OVD-Info’s employees, but that legal assistance, one of the pillars of the organisation, is a task that is impossible to do remotely. Moreover, the number of requests for it has greatly increased after the war started, Anisimov adds, since OVD Info decided to expand its legal support from any persecution related to freedom of assembly to any followed by expressing anti-war positions. More cases to assist with also means more stories to report and share with its readers. 

The human rights project also supports other initiatives that financially and legally help politically persecuted individuals, in case “something happens” to OVD-Info. “The Russian government has not used all the tools that it has available against us,” Anisimov says. 

Source of the cover photo: Vladislav Postnikov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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