Month: November 2025 (Page 1 of 6)

On the morning of March 31, 2025, Ekaterina Fomina waited anxiously in Berlin. She was expecting a message from her lawyer, Yulia Kuznetsova, with an update on her case. It was only the fourth session, and her lawyer had not yet been allowed to present their defense.

Then her phone flashed. It was not her lawyer, but a colleague. More notifications followed. Fomina’s name began to appear across Russian media. Within half an hour, the Moscow court handling her case had sentenced her in absentia to eight and a half years in prison for “spreading fake news” about the Russian army, one of the heaviest penalties under the law.

“I was crying a lot,” she said. “Because it is not about committing a crime and receiving a fair sentence. It is about realizing that your country calls you a terrorist.”

Fomina’s sentence is part of the Kremlin’s sweeping campaign to silence independent journalists since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, forcing the majority to flee the country. Berlin, where Fomina now lives, has become the informal capital of this fractured press in exile. Since the war began, hundreds of Russian journalists have relocated to the city, supported by a fragile network of advocacy groups and NGOs. They continue their reporting, but they struggle to find an audience. 

Inside Russia, their work is banned, criminalized, or drowned out by a state-media ecosystem that has reshaped public opinion with relentless discipline. Outside Russia, they face a different form of suspicion due to their country of origin. It’s softer, diffuse, often unspoken, but no less corrosive. They speak from a position that is simultaneously authoritative and unwanted: those who know the system best have become the least trusted narrators of its violence. Their exile had quickly become epistemic.

The foundations of the paradox lie inside Russia itself. The prosecution of journalists like Fomina rests on a public narrative that has been cultivated for years, where dissent is treachery and alternative accounts of the war are foreign plots.

Political scientist Grigore Pop-Eleches, who has conducted daily online surveys of Russian public opinion since May 2022, describes a landscape that has barely budged since the invasion began. “About 65% are in favour of the war… between 40 and 45% are strongly pro-war,” he said. Supporters stay supporters; opponents withdraw from public view. Even major disruptions such as high casualties and criticism of the Ministry of Defense barely penetrate. “Putin is Teflon,” he added.

Underlying this is a media diet that, for many Russians, has not changed in decades. “Between 80 and 90% of supporters watched state TV daily,” Pop-Eleches explained. Opponents consumed a mix of TV and online sources, but remained a minority.

For exiled journalists, this means a fundamental rupture. Their professional identity depends on an audience that no longer sees them as legitimate. Many Russians are either unable or unwilling to access their work. Others view them through the lens the Kremlin engineered years ago, as agents of sabotage. Independent reporting is still accessible through VPNs that bypass censorship, but demand is thin.

“Only those who before the war had political thinking still continue receiving news,” Fomina said. “The majority of the population are actually suffering from the lack of technical education… people are very limited in receiving alternative information.”

The legal case against her reflects this distance. She described the file as sloppy, almost doughy, filled with errors and misattributions. Bucha was misspelled, and a male voice was attributed to her. “They simply did not care,” she said. Guilt simply functioned as a reaffirmation of the state’s narrative rather than a refutation of her reporting.

For journalists like her, the audience that matters most has been structurally deregistered from reality. To them, she is now just a threat.

If Russians distrust exiled journalists for being too distant from the state, others distrust them for being too close to it.

This tension shadows the lives of nearly all Russian reporters in Europe. In Prague, where Fomina lived for two years before moving to Berlin, the hostility was open. “We are representatives of a country who is the aggressor,” she recalled. “They don’t care about our work, they simply generalize.” 

The difficulty is not only political but social. Everyday interactions become tests of perception. At a house party in Berlin, Fomina noticed people avoiding her once they learned where she was from. The first question in all interactions is always “Where are you from?” A question loaded with consequences. “You don’t know what will be the reaction,” she said. “People could not understand the depth of your experience.”

Anastasia Korotkova, another young journalist now based in Berlin, experiences a parallel form of invisibility. At only twenty-six, she writes under a pseudonym for security reasons. She works as a researcher for The New York Times, but they don’t allow pseudonyms, leaving her uncredited. “You either put your name, or you’re not putting your name,” she said. “At least they let me work.”

To be visible enough to matter, she must expose herself to danger. To be safe, she must disappear. European media institutions often demand transparency and documentation in ways that Russian journalists, whose families remain inside the country, cannot provide. 

The social fabric of exile reflects the same tension. Berlin is full of Russian journalists, but the community is fractured. Competitive, anxious, wary of infiltration. “Any Russian independent media is still Russian,” Korotkova said. “If they want to ditch you, they will ditch you.” Rumours circulate quickly,  and reputations stick. “There is no union. Nobody is fighting for our rights.”

And around them, a broader European public that often cannot distinguish between the Russian state and its opponents. “Locals could not understand me,” Fomina said. “Because of informational wars, I’m also kind of a very problematic person.”

The result is a peculiar dislocation. Exiled journalists are neither trusted by the society they fled, nor fully welcomed by the one they entered. Their work is doubted from all sides.

If ordinary Europeans struggle to understand who these journalists are, state institutions often seem even more confused. Russians fleeing the regime arrive in systems with few tools to recognise them as dissidents or protect them as such. The result is a kind of bureaucratic violence: not overt persecution, but rules and omissions that make their lives precarious while never fully acknowledging what they risked to leave.

In Berlin, this begins with paperwork. Unlike Ukrainians, who received a clear temporary protection regime, anti-war Russians often arrive into what Danila Bedyaev, a former regional journalist from Yaroslavl, described as a system that “didn’t know what to do with us.”

Many staff in refugee agencies were themselves Ukrainian, carrying their own grief. For them, helping Russians, however opposed to the war, was emotionally fraught.

For Bedyaev and his family, this ambiguity became an eight-month legal limbo. They had reached Germany after a hurried escape through Egypt, following his wife’s detention for an individual anti-war protest. As their visas neared expiration, they applied for protection but insisted on remaining in Berlin rather than being sent to a refugee camp. NGOs argued they should be moved from asylum to a freelance status that would allow them to work. The immigration office’s response was a letter claiming that all of the family’s passports—Russian and even his young son’s American one—had been lost.

Pressure from lawyers and NGOs eventually forced the authorities to issue “grey passports” (travel documents for non-citizens) and a freelance residence permit. By then, they had spent months without documents or a clear category.

For younger reporters like Korotkova, the path is different but equally exposed. Ineligible for a humanitarian visa, she applied for a German freelance visa from France. Officials demanded €23,000 blocked in her bank account, money she would only receive back slowly as a pseudo-salary—a way to ensure she would “never apply for political asylum,” she explained. Lawyers later negotiated the amount down to €11,000, but the principle remained. She borrowed from friends, stacked fellowships, and convinced her part-time employer to pay a year’s salary in advance so she could briefly show the balance. “Technically, I had all the rights to go for political asylum,” she said, but feared being placed in refugee facilities and losing the ability to work.

In practice, these systems treat anti-war Russians less as people at risk than as potential burdens. To acknowledge them as political refugees would require states to accept not just the war’s victims, but its internal opponents too. Instead, they are funnelled into categories designed for workers, tourists, or generic migrants.

The sense of not being seen is compounded by another, more intimate pressure: the fear that even in exile, they are still being watched. Fomina describes a social world in which stories circulate about acquaintances later discovered to have been recruited by Russian security services. “There are so many open cases like this,” she said. “This makes you very closed and not trusting anyone.”

Friends warn her that certain familiar faces were in fact working with the FSB (Russia’s Secret Service). At a conference, she met a man who claimed to have read articles of hers that were published before she became publicly known. “Maybe he’s really a fellow,” she recalled thinking, “but I can’t trust him, because I did not know him personally in advance.”

Many exiled Russians keep separate phones, separate chats, separate layers of themselves. 

In this sense, exile reproduces some of the conditions they fled. The Kremlin’s campaign to discredit critics worked so thoroughly that even far from its physical reach, the fear of its agents continues to shape how they live. The collapse of trust that defines their relationship with audiences also permeates their own community. 

Yet their reporting does not stop.

At TV Rain, Fomina began producing documentaries, shifting from written investigations to visual storytelling. “You can’t just describe the face of a person who recently lost her child by a terrorist attack,” she explained. “I saw a huge potential in producing documentaries.” Her latest film followed mothers searching for missing sons and volunteers collecting bodies on the front lines. “From the Russian side, we talked to mothers… from the other side, we filmed volunteers collecting these bodies,” she said. The juxtapositions revealed the human cost of the war that official narratives tried to bury, and the growing realization among families that the state was hiding the truth.

Korotkova’s work follows a different route. She spends hours texting soldiers, navigating harassment and flirtation to extract fragments of reality. “Men are really lonely there,” she said. “When I ask real questions, they’re answering.” Her investigations into sexual violence in occupied Ukraine even reached UN officials, with whom she’s now collaborating.

Her method shows the new conditions of reporting on Russia. Remote, precarious, built on unstable channels of communication. She is trusted by sources who would never speak to Western institutions.

In Berlin, these methods overlap in unexpected ways. The city provides a kind of infrastructure made up of co-working spaces built by NGOs, legal advice, old colleagues who reappear. Safety comes with a different kind of constraint: distance. The very freedom that allows them to keep speaking also severs their connection to the country they are speaking about.

Danila Bedyaev, a former regional journalist from Yaroslavl, sees the community from another angle. He no longer works in media officially—his job title is now “tech management and IT”—but he staffs the spaces where exiled journalists gather managed by the NGO MiCT. He helps build recording studios, fix equipment, set up workstations. He sees the flow of people passing through: Ukrainians, Belarusians, Afghans, Syrians, Russians. “It’s a common story,” he said. His own life in Berlin is modest and rooted, but he still describes his experience as part of journalism. “I really want to make my story public one day,” he said. “There are a lot of stories of exiled people that need to be shared.”

All of these reporters share the awareness that their work may reach no one who most needs to hear it.

Inside Russia, the space for dissent has constricted even further. According to Pop-Eleches, people who oppose the war are increasingly reluctant to discuss it even with friends. “They’re probably afraid even if you’re among friends,” he said. “It seems they’re starting to withdraw a little bit more from the social side of it.” Silence becomes a survival strategy, and in the repressive Russian context, it reinforces itself.

In this environment, exiled journalists lose access to their audience, but their audience also loses access to itself. Trust evaporates in both directions.

For reporters like Fomina, this dynamic extends into the personal. She remains in contact with families of Ukrainians killed in the war, building relationships that blur the lines between reporting and mourning. “Each journalist has its own cemetery,” she said. “I can’t even count how many people I buried distantly, remotely.” The images sent by sources remain on her phone, unopened on days when she cannot face them. Her work is recognized abroad, yet to many Russians, her name has become shorthand for betrayal.

Korotkova worries about the sustainability of this work. “Many media just lost a lot of financing, and now we’re just in survival mode,” she said. Good journalists are leaving the profession. Younger ones have never worked inside Russia and lack the context needed to report on it. “They don’t know how it works inside,” she explained. “And who’s gonna train them?” She fears a future where people think of the journalistic profession as activism. 

And in Berlin, the freedom that allows reporting to continue also thins the connection to its subject. “You live in one country, one agenda, but all your work is concentrated on another,” Fomina said. “It’s like you’re living in two different worlds.”

From Berlin, the work looks both small and outsized. It cannot reverse public opinion in Russia. It cannot cut through the fog of propaganda. It cannot restore trust that was deliberately dismantled. But it preserves a record. It keeps open the possibility that someone, now or later, will remember how the system actually worked.

The verdict on Fomina’s phone that morning announced one truth about her: what the Russian state believes she is. Her reporting, and that of the colleagues who share her exile, insists on another.

Russian journalists in exile are trusted by few, and distrusted by many. Still, despite all of it, they remain committed to telling a story that may not yet have an audience, but will one day need one.

A youth group in Almaz Church looks like any other gathering of young evangelicals: teenagers in flannels and hoodies lounging around a table, snacking on chips and discussing how God has touched their lives. 

 But these are not ordinary evangelicals. Almaz is a Baptist congregation in Germany, a country where the denomination accounts for only about 1 percent of the population. The congregants are Ukrainians who have fled the full-scale invasion, and in youth group, the teens and 20-somethings swap stories of this relative or that cousin had been saved from a drone or a missile strike thanks to God’s hand. 

Their devotion is especially striking because many of them did not grow up Baptist, or religious at all. But since the full-scale invasion, Almaz, and Ukrainian evangelical churches across Germany, have seen a significant influx of young refugee converts who hope the faith will help them make sense of the war.

“It was helpful for me to believe that God [could] control a situation in my country, in my city, my family, in my church, in my life,” said Martin Skopych, one of Almaz’s youth group leaders and the son of the church’s pastor.

[TK three-four character grafs from Wednesday interview with Almaz-adjacent congregant who got baptized in January]

There are other reasons for this transmission. For a refugee family, evangelical churches like Almaz are sometimes the only Ukrainian cultural centers available. This is the case in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town of 50,000 people, where Almaz has put down roots to serve a growing refugee population (Gummersbach now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022). In Almaz’s Telegram, alongside posts for prayers or church events, community members also advertise couches for sale and cheer for Ukraine’s national soccer team.

These young people also have some amount of lingering resentment with the dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church, perceiving it to be overly staid and reliant on tradition “you must be holy,” Lisa, another Ukrainian girl I met in Gummersbach, told me. But above all else, the teachings of Baptism have legitimate resonance for young Ukrainians trying to cope with the loss of their families and homes.

The small foothold of evangelical conversions among Germany’s Ukrainian refugees is notable for a country — indeed, a continent — where religiosity has been sharply declining for decades. Baptists are a significant minority in Ukraine; the official association of Ukrainian Baptist churches claims only about 120,000 members, while more than three in five Ukrainians identify with the Eastern Orthodox church.

TRANSITION?

In the United States, however, Ukrainian Baptist churches are still waiting for this wave of evangelism to hit. In the past year, the Ukrainian Baptist Convention of America has recorded only 100 new baptisms — up from previous years, said Vlad Shanava, the president of the convention’s youth ministry, but still “unimpressive.”

[TK quote from another youth leader — Vlad himself was not very worried about this lack of growth but I’d imagine others are]

The Ukrainian Baptist coalition in the United States is and has always been fragile. The convention only has 24 registered churches, half of which are clustered in southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, totaling to about 3,500 adult members. The convention’s website is littered with churches that have closed their doors across the country: Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Fresno, Calif.

The churches that have survived have been kept together by successive waves of migration — missionaries from South America in the 1960s and 1970s, priests fleeing Soviet persecution in the 1990s, and now refugees from Russia’s full-scale invasion — that have required shifts in services and tactics. 

“Four years ago before the war, I feel like  … we were moving into the direction of potentially more American-centered services,” said Shanava. “But the war definitely brought us back a little bit because of the influx of refugees.”

But unlike at Almaz, where the vast majority of services and materials are in Ukrainian and German is rarely spoken, the churches in Shanava’s circles are still not wholly focused on supporting refugees. They would like to — emphasis on like — also be open to Americans Americans of any stripe, even if they’re not Ukrainian.

“The UBC’s goal is not only to be available for Ukrainian Christians,” Shanava said. “Obviously we were in America, and we’re available to all cultures, all ethnicities, and the gospel is to be preached there until, as he says in the Bible, till the end of the world.”

Despite their varying audiences, on doctrine, the German and American versions of Ukrainian Baptism are fairly similar.

“It’s clearly said that you’re not perfect. You cannot be perfect. Nobody can be perfect. But Jesus still loves you, Jesus still died for you and died for your sins,” said Viktoriia Hluschenko, who lives in Düsseldorf but often attends services at Almaz. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

“The thing that Baptist teaching specifically offers is that there’s no gimmicks,” said Shanava. “God loves you because of you, because of the value that you have as a human being.”

Threads to pursue:

• The frosty relationship with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
• Two more conversion stories
• May look to restructure around the theme of “tale of two Baptist movements.” Almaz and other German churches have built really vibrant communities in a very secular country. Evangelism is alive and well in the United States, but the Baptist churches here are hanging on for dear life. 

It was an early Wednesday morning, and seventy people were already in line at a Wohnungsbesichtigung, a public house viewing in Berlin. Sam Albaid, who had been looking for a stable apartment for months, clutched his folder of documents as he approached the representative: credit report, ID, references, everything he had been told he needed. The man skimmed the papers until he reached one detail.

“You’re with the job center?” he asked, referring to the government office that dispenses social benefits.

Sam nodded.

“Don’t even try it,” the representative said. “They will not even read it.”

“Why? Is this legal?” Sam asked.

“No,” the man said, “but that’s what’s gonna happen.”

Sam never had a chance, not because of missing documents, but because he received social benefits. Like thousands of other refugees in Berlin, he found himself trapped in a contradiction at the very center of Germany’s integration system. When Sam arrived from Syria via Istanbul in 2017, he entered the long pre-work phase required of most asylum seekers: months, sometimes years, of German-language classes, cultural orientation sessions, and vocational integration courses. Only after clearing these hurdles could he even begin applying for real jobs. At the same time, he had to navigate the slow asylum process, which could take months or years.

In this early stage, refugees cannot work full-time, and many cannot work at all. Without income, they rely on benefits to survive. Yet, once they do, landlords often shut them out, rendering them unable to secure permanent housing at precisely the moment they need it most.

Niklas Harder, Co-head of the Integration Department at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, explained the logic he hears from landlords again and again. Yes, a job center letter means rent is guaranteed by the state. But from a landlord’s perspective, Harder said, it signals something else entirely: “They get relatively little in terms of quantity,” he said. “So a lot of people want to ask higher rents, and they don’t accept tenants who are on social benefits.”

To understand this dynamic, one has to understand Germany’s social housing system and what’s gone wrong with it. In Germany, “social housing” refers to rent-controlled apartments whose rent levels are capped and legally compatible with what social benefits will cover. These units are, in theory, the solution for people like Sam: affordable, regulated, and protected from the volatility of the private market.

But Berlin simply does not have enough of them. The stock of social housing has shrunk dramatically over the past decades as units age out of regulation. Demand, meanwhile, has surged, driven by demographic change, urban growth, and successive waves of asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and other conflicts.

As a result, new arrivals who could theoretically pay rent with their benefits cannot actually rent anything. And the unsubsidized private market is even more out of reach. Berlin’s private rents have risen so sharply that even refugees who do find work struggle to afford them.

The consequences are visible in shelters across the city. People remain in overcrowded temporary housing far longer than the system was designed for. The shelters were meant to serve as short-term landing pads; instead, families spend months or years waiting for a chance at something permanent.

Even those who might want to escape Berlin’s impossible housing market face another hurdle: German federalism. Refugees are assigned to a specific municipality when they receive benefits, and those benefits, including housing support, can only be used within that region.

“You’re basically assigned to an office that pays out your social benefits,” Harder explained. “And they will only pay for rent that is in their region of responsibility.”

This means that even if more affordable housing exists in a neighboring state, beneficiaries are effectively anchored in place. They cannot simply move to where housing is available. Federalism, designed for administrative order, inadvertently becomes a barrier to mobility and therefore to integration.

Together, these constraints create a vicious trap: without a job, refugees cannot rent an apartment. Without an apartment, they cannot easily get a job.

At first glance, this seems overstated. Surely someone can get a job while living in a shelter? But in practice, employers require a stable address for payroll, tax documents, and background checks. Banks require a stable address to open an account. Employers look for proof that a potential employee can reliably stay in the city. And for refugees juggling appointments with the migration office, language courses, legal processes, and shelter rules, demonstrating that stability becomes nearly impossible.

This is especially paradoxical in Germany, a country facing a major labor shortage and desperately trying to bring more workers into the economy. But integration into the workforce is not as simple as filling open positions.

“Even the positions in unskilled labor in Germany demand a minimum amount of language and literacy,” Harder said. For refugees with limited formal education, this represents a major hurdle. For those who are highly educated (doctors, engineers, teachers) another problem arises: without advanced German fluency, professional credential recognition remains unreachable. A Syrian doctor, for example, must communicate flawlessly with patients, colleagues, and medical institutions.

The focus here falls on what comes after a refugee leaves the asylum and state-run accommodation system, or tries to. During the initial phase, refugees live in shelters where they are provided food, basic furniture, and a shared room. But the transition out of shelters is exactly where most refugees become stuck.

Those who succeed face discrimination from landlords, steep deposits, guarantor requirements, and bureaucratic tangles. Those who don’t remain in limbo: unable to build a stable life, unable to advance in language learning, and unable to integrate socially or economically.

There are models that work. Programs like ARRIVO connect refugees with apprenticeships and skilled trades. Some NGOs help with bureaucratic navigation: [“registration for all,” ] These programs show what is possible when integration efforts are aligned across housing, employment, and social services.

But they remain exceptions in a system that too often leaves people behind.

Berlin’s housing market has become both a mirror and a test of Germany’s broader promise to integrate those who came seeking safety. The gap between that promise and the reality, between the job center letter and the closed doors it triggers, reveals the structural contradictions refugee communities must navigate.

When Sam described his language courses, his early hopes, and the spiraling difficulties he faced afterward, his story illuminated the heart of the issue: racism, housing discrimination, and labor-market barriers are not separate challenges. They reinforce one another.

Refugees are fighting for the basic building blocks of belonging: a stable home, a job that pays, and the dignity of agency over their futures. 

At ten years old, while kicking a soccer ball on a field in Berlin, Nabil Rayk could already sense he was the “other.” The opposing team’s parents, “the Proper Germans” as he puts it, would shout insults from the sidelines. “Kick that Arab, kick that N-word” he recalled. 

“For them,” Nabil said, “sometimes sport is a replacement for war.”

A decade later, this same hostility has gone beyond the boundaries of sport. Divisions are now making their way into parliament debates and campaign rallies. These divisions are not new to European football, but their resurgence reflects the growing influence of far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has gained momentum across Germany through its anti-immigrant rhetoric.

For many immigrants and people of color, this prejudice is forcing their ethnic, religious, or racial identities and even their gender or sexual orientation into the spotlight. It leaves them questioning whether Germany truly sees them as part of the nation or as outsiders.

“Football is the real heavy tradition in Germany, it’s really hard to change something here in the football system, ” said Stenny Bamer, a social worker for the fan scene of  BFC Dynamo, a football club based in East Berlin, at Fanprojekt der Sportjugend Berlin. 

Fanprojekt is an independent initiative created by the Berlin Sports Organization to engage football fans aged 14 to 27 whose home teams are either BFC Dynamo or Hertha BSC, another club based in Berlin. It hopes to foster inclusion, anti-discrimination, and a sense of community through football culture.

“I see a change in the fan scenes. They are getting more conservative, more right-wing.  There is a real influence of the AfD policy on the football fans,” Bamer added.

In Germany, a football club’s reputation often carries political significance and fans play a major role in shaping it. Eastern clubs like Dynamo have traditionally been linked to right-leaning politics, while many Western clubs are seen as more left-leaning.

Prior to meeting Bamer, when I mentioned to a German sports journalist that I planned to attend a BFC Dynamo match for this story, he warned me not to go as a person of color, as it might not be safe. 

“I would never say to an immigrant person, go to a BFC Dynamo game because there are a lot of far right extremists,” Bamer said.

Bamer wants the unwelcoming atmosphere at clubs like Dynamo to disappear. He’s not alone as journalists, representatives from local NGOs, and club officials I spoke with also called for a more inclusive football environment where immigrant players are celebrated and immigrant fans feel welcome rather than treated as “others.”

Across these conversations, two main strategies for change emerged: change driven by club leadership or change as a result from the pressure of supporters. 

“In some clubs, it [change] can come from the top down. But in others, like St. Pauli, it came from the fans themselves,” Bamer said. 

St. Pauli, unlike Dynamo, is a liberal stronghold shaped by fan activism. During the 1980s and 90s, as neo-Nazi hooliganism spread through European football, more left-wing activists settled in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district and publicly stood against fascist values in the stadium, rejecting racism and extremism. 

Their pressure led the club to become the first in Germany to ban right-wing nationalist displays inside the stadium.  Today, St. Pauli remains committed to equality and diversity, and was one of 12 German clubs to publicly condemn the AfD earlier this year. 

Dynamo, in contrast, did not speak out against the party.

At Dynamo, the shift towards inclusion has been slower. Anti-immigrant sentiment and nostalgia for old identities sometimes coexist with loyalty. Bamer recalls how a Nigerian player was renamed by fans with a German nickname because they could not pronounce his last name. “Everybody loved him,” he said, “but I always had the feeling it was also a little bit of making a joke out of his name.”

Germany has 84 million people, 25 million with immigrant backgrounds, yet many including AfD supporters resist diversity.

The night the news broke that Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator, had fallen, Hesham Moamadani felt his world tilt. On the desk beside him lay his freshly minted German passport, issued only days earlier, its polished red cover catching the light of the TV. Nearly a decade had passed since he’d crossed into Germany’s borders with nothing but the clothes on his back, fleeing Assad’s dictatorial regime and indiscriminate violence. That day, he sat in his Berlin apartment with a document that confirmed his place, only for the very reason he’d fled to flicker out into the oblivion of the German evening news. A mix of conflicting emotions—joy, overwhelm, and disbelief—washed over him, soon followed by anxiety for his other Syrian friends who still lacked passports.

Moamadani was one of nearly 300,000 people who were granted German citizenship in 2024, a record for the nation. A large number of Syrian refugees who arrived during former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s border openings in 2015-2016 became eligible for naturalization that year, and Moamadani was one of them. 

What most didn’t anticipate, though, was that the dreaded Assad regime would collapse abruptly, mobilizing a stream of disputes within the German government on whether or not to repatriate Syrian nationals back to their home country. Particularly inflamed by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the West, German politicians remain divided; and Syrians, many of whom have lived in Germany for years but are yet to receive their citizenship, remain in judicial limbo, with many fearful that the regime’s fall continues to serve.

“The … welcoming culture is no longer the dominant force in German political opinion,” said Jonas Wiedner, a German sociologist who studies social stratification and integration issues faced by immigrants in Germany. “There’s a large majority of people who want to see migration limited, and also want to see foreigners, particularly refugees, reduced in Germany.” 

While there’s credence to the claim that Germany’s rightward, anti-immigrant shift is a part of a broader shift observable in many Western countries today, Wiedner noted that Germany stands in a particularly unique position. With their open-border policy history and relationship to Syrian refugees specifically, Wiedner believes that the border policies from 2015 played significantly “into the hands of the far right.”

But the far right is no longer the only demographic embracing anti-immigrant policy in Germany. The AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland), or Germany’s populist far-right party, gained significant voter traction after embracing mass deportation policies. Even the traditional center-right political powerhouse, the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union), whose members hold the largest share of seats in the German Bundestag, has begun ceding to the anti-immigration narrative, too.

After a visit to Damascus, Syria, earlier this month, Germany’s Foreign Minister and CDU member Johann Wadephul said in a statement to German news network Deutsche Welle that “hardly anyone can live here [in Syria] with dignity.” During a meeting in parliament, Wadephul allegedly made a remark that said today’s “Syria looked worse than postwar Germany.” 

Wadephul’s statements irked other high-ranking German politicians in the CDU/CSU party, drawing scrutiny from many of his more conservative colleagues. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose pointed remarks appeared to address Wadepuhl indirectly, noted that “there is no longer any reason for [Syrian] asylum in Germany, and therefore, [Germany] can begin repatriations.” 

For now, voluntary repatriation and deportations of Syrians with criminal records remain at the forefront of the CDU’s policies. But only 0.1% of Germany’s Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland a year after Assad’s fall. Those like Moamadani know that they are lucky. But to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians under more precarious circumstances — such as those with temporary residence permits or a subsidiary protection status — small shifts can feel potentially life-altering.

*** 

I’ve been sitting in an empty Zoom conference for 15 minutes when a pixelated apparition of Stephan Mayer’s round, doughy face emerges from the void. The flickering lights of German apartment buildings flash by in his car window. He mutters a sentence in German — I respond that I can only understand English. “ Make it quick,” he says. “I only have a few minutes.”

Mayer, who has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2002, stepped down from his role as Secretary-General of Germany’s CSU party in early 2022 after making death threats to a journalist for reporting on his illegitimate child. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mayer served as the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 2018 to 2021. Now, he is a ‘Spokesperson for Sports’ of the CDU/CSU party. As part of his former Parliamentary State Secretary position, however, Mayer said that determining the CDU/CSU’s stance on migration policy was one of the key aspects of his job.

“I followed the discussions about migration, and especially illegal migration, very intensively within the last decade,” he said. “I am deeply opposing the theory that there [has been] a shift in [Germany’s] Willkommenskultur.”

Critical to the argument for Syrian repatriation — a policy Mayer remains a strong proponent of — is the notion that a post-Assad Syria is safe for return. “Fortunately, we now have quite [a] stable government in Syria,” Mayer said. “I just had a briefing with the Federal [Foreign Office], and they are very confident that the al-Sharaa government is stabilizing.” The meeting presumably included Johann Wadepuhl, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who opposed Syrian repatriation after making contentious comments about Syria’s safety after the fall of Assad.

But if Syria is truly safe for return as Mayer and some of his colleagues propose, there seem to be other strong incentives keeping return rates at bay.

In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars — a series of ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies in the Balkan region that lasted over 10 years —  sparked a major refugee and humanitarian crisis in Europe. Generous estimates put the number of refugees at nearly 1 million. Germany received a large number of refugees — around 700,000.

[TK: more on Germany’s successful repatriation of refugees after Yugoslav Wars; But Syrians have been here for 10 years (as opposed to 3-4) and Germany has invested billions of Euros into their integration. In Wiedner’s words, only now is that ‘investment bearing fruit’ — Syrians have stable jobs, speak fluent German, many of them have graduated from German institutions, etc…]

When Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper of the Afghan Women’s National Soccer Team, flew out of Germany, she risked never being allowed back in. On October 31st, she and her sister, Nazima, were three days out from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana mountains. Nazira’s legs were still sore from the marathon she’d run the week before. But as she waited to display her refugee travel document to the security officer at Frankfurt am Main, Nazira had bigger concerns on her mind. 

Nazira’s status in Germany is tenuous. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy, where she obtained asylum. In 2023, she moved to Frankfurt, reuniting with her family after nearly two years of separation. After over a year of waiting, her asylum application was processed–and then, rejected. By EU law, refugees can’t apply for asylum in two countries. A non-resident, Nazira now straddles a bureaucratic contradiction. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it says in German on her ID. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” 

Nazira is not alone. According to the Federal Statistics Office, over 177,000 others have duldung, which means something like “toleration.” Similar to the U.S.’s Temporary Protected Status, Germany’s duldung shields holders from deportation while denying them residency. Duldung may be issued to people without passports or documents, people who are too sick to travel, or people who face danger at home. As soon as the grounds for duldung go away, the German government may revoke its protections. In other words, duldung offers some safety–but only for as long as Germany deems it necessary. 

On the day of her flight, Nazira took little comfort in her tolerated status. She turned to her sister in line for security and said, “What about if the police catch me?”

 

Nazira is used to hiding. As a young girl, she and her sister started the first girls’ soccer team in their native Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan. They snuck off to early morning practices multiple times a week, telling their parents they were going to an English class that met before school. Mostly in secret, Nazira’s love for sports took hold. At 11, she won a 10k, crossing the finish line in a long dress and tattered sandals. Her parents only discovered she ran when, after a race, she was broadcast on their home TV. 

Born in 2004, Nazira came of age after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban regime. In the two decades that followed, women ran, swam, and biked in triathlons abroad. Powerlifters won gold medals in India and Kazakhstan. The Afghan Women’s National Team formed in 2007, and won its first international match in 2012. By 2013, female Afghan athletes had accumulated some 100 medals. Through running, soccer, and skiing, Nazira added to that tally. As a female athlete, she was a minority in a conservative culture. But for most of her life, she was safe. 

That changed in early 2021, when the Taliban started to gain control of the provinces surrounding Kabul. One night, Nazira woke up to her phone ringing. It was a driver from Free to Run, the organization that sponsored Nazira’s first race, offering to help her escape. Talib soldiers had entered Bamiyan, he said while calling from the city center.

In recent months, violence had escalated in Bamiyan for the first time since the Taliban’s regime. In September of 1998, Taliban soldiers first entered Bamiyan and killed an estimated 500 people. Three years later, the group exploded the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, hollowing out a cliff the height of a ten-story building. This history fresh in her mind, Nazira pushed a desk in front of her door. She changed into a long black dress, threw clothes into a small suitcase, and gathered the trophies, medals, and certificates that adorned her room, tying them up in a tapestry. 

For hours, Nazira paced the room, scared that Taliban soldiers were waiting outside her door. Her soccer teammates, many of whom ended up escaping into the mountains surrounding the valley city of Bamiyan, called to ask where she would flee. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying. 

When Nazira got to Kabul, she joined her sister Nazima, who’d left home months earlier, in the basement room she was renting with several other women. For months, they shared a twin bed, their heads resting on opposite ends of a top-bunk mattress. It was around this time that Nazima–an athlete with a unique hunger for adventure–ventured into the black market. She’d won a scholarship to study in Malaysia, and needed a visa so she could travel to Pakistan for her appointment at the embassy (there is no Malaysian embassy in Afghanistan). Between odd meetings with a network of fixers, she traveled around the country, giving tours to English-speaking tourists. In May of 2021 she moved to Pakistan, narrowly escaping her country’s fall to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Nazira joined the Afghan Women’s National Team as a goalkeeper and started training for a match in Tajikistan, set for the end of August. 

These plans were upended on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul. As a high-profile female athlete, Nazira was especially at risk. During this time, photos were circulating online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.   

Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.” 

 

It was family, not escape, that brought Nazira to Germany. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy with her ski coach. In a matter of months, she obtained asylum and made plans to take college courses, and in February of 2023, earned a spot on AC Milan. “I see football like a member of my parents, like my brother or sister,” she said in her introductory video for the team. “I cannot live without football.” 

But just when she started gaining a sense of stability in Italy, everything changed. Her sister, Nazima–who went to Germany on a short-term Schengen visa, after her visa to Malaysia was denied–had been dizzy for months. She blamed her symptoms–vomitting, fatigue, and short, acute headaches–on stress. But soon, her illness became impossible to ignore. On July 27th, 2023, Nazira left her new team, her asylum status, and her college career in Italy to reunite with her family after nearly two years of separation. On August 21st, Nazima underwent an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Nazira stayed in the hospital for three months as her sister recovered, sleeping in a small chair in the room or a supplies closet. 

As her relatives obtained asylum one by one, Nazira adapted as best she could to her second country of refuge. As she had in Italy, she started to learn the language and joined a team, FC Mittelbuchen. In August, the opportunity arose for her to play at the professional level, for FIFA’s newly inaugurated refugee team. Selection camps would be held in Australia and England. By duldung rules, Nazira was supposed to stay in Germany. But for Nazira, the risks of leaving Germany–a country that seemed to want her gone–were worth it. 

Next steps: 

• Context section about the shifting relationship between German government and Taliban 
• Scene: Nazira’s selection as goalie 
• What’s next? Italian asylum expires in a year 
• Conclusion: race in Mallorca

As Martin Kohler strolled down Sonnenallee, the main drag of the Berlin borough of Neukölln, he could not contain his dismay. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers in heavy coats browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and perused grocery stores that boasted halal meat. Letting loose a grim laugh, Kohler’s conclusion was blunt: “No integration.”

Speaking to the camera held by his companion on the street, Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city. “First,” he said, “it’s one kebab shop. And then on the opposite side there opens a shisha bar, [then] a shop for halal meat. And even more, you have a street where Muslims are feeling quite well. And then more are coming.” His colleague, an up-and-coming conservative YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not. That’s why so many Germans [are] leaving Berlin.” 

The video that the YouTuber published from his tour with Kohler, titled “Germany is Out of Control,” garnered more than 270,000 views. In it, Kohler, a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, claimed that Berlin was under attack from a hostile population of Muslim migrants that chose to reproduce their own culture in Germany rather than assimilating into the existing society. 

Kohler has made it his mission to reverse this trend. So have his colleagues in AfD Berlin. They face headwinds: Berlin is Germany’s most progressive, multicultural, and migrant-friendly city, after all. But that challenge just makes Kohler more determined. “As a patriot,” he told me, “if you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.” With an election coming later next year, can their far-right project have a shot in Berlin? 

***

The AfD has been on the rise since 2013, when the party burst onto Germany’s political scene with a populist conservative program. Its founders lashed out against Angela Merkel’s government for bailing out southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis. Then, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015, uttering her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”), AfD rebutted, suggesting Germany couldn’t—and shouldn’t. Soon, it unveiled its vehement opposition to migrants from Muslim countries.

Since its founding, AfD has evolved with the times, fanning flames of animosity against whatever coalition was in power. When Covid hit Germany, party leaders adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, allying themselves with the far-right group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). When energy prices began to soar after the Russia-Ukraine war, AfD turned its ire on renewable energy, blaming climate policies that incentivized wind and solar energy installations. Party members even began to attack proposals to put speed limits on the Autobahn to save on gas. “They are really strategically clever crisis entrepreneurs,” said Manès Wiesskircher, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), “rejecting all government policies in order to benefit from the dismay among significant parts of the population.”

With these strategies, the party has surged in popularity to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. It shocked the country with its performance in the 2025 federal elections, winning over 20 percent of the vote share. “There’s only three parties in all of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who made it above 20% in a federal election,” said Robert Eschricht, a state representative for Neukölln. “We really are up and coming.” The AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.

 But what is true for the country has not yet become a reality in Berlin. At the state level, a center-right coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Internally, the state party has faced difficulties, too. Plagued by a history of infighting and candidate controversy, its leaders have tried to improve the party’s professional appearance and break ground among new voter groups. [potential TK about intra-party conflict]

“They think we are the devil,” said Berlin party chair Kristin Brinker. As the 2026 federal elections approach, their  mission is to convince the public otherwise. 

***

 After the lights came on in a crowded AfD field office, Ronald Gläser took the stage in front of a muted audience. A dozen rows of people had come to the office in Pankow, an hour’s train ride from downtown Berlin, on a cold October evening. Sitting on folding chairs facing Gläser, their faces were sober. They had just watched two hours of alarming documentary footage: protestors getting beaten up by police in body armor, diagrams of needles entering arms and injecting black particles into bodies, men in lab coats speaking in assured tones about the dangers of government-sponsored vaccinations. 

Gläser, an unassuming man with a prominent scar on his nose and a red cravat tucked beneath his collar, was the host for the evening’s event: a screening of a Covid vaccine-skeptic documentary called “Just a Prick: In the Shadow of Vaccination,” followed by a Q&A with its director. Now, it was time for Gläser, an AfD representative for Berlin in Germany’s federal parliament, to field questions and comments from the audience to the director. 

The room had the feel of a group therapy session, as individuals within the crowd of mostly older people stood up to share stories of how their lives were disrupted by Germany’s pandemic lockdown. Some lamented that they could not travel across state borders during the lockdown, while others spoke of health complications they experienced after receiving a Covid vaccine dose. 

Gläser nodded at each testimony in sympathy, interjecting every now and then to provide his own perspective as a member of the Bundestag. He channeled frustration at Germany’s response to the pandemic into a generalized attack on the current governing coalition and its civil service. “They are so cheeky. They come up with all kinds of lies,” he said, his voice rising in outrage. 

Gläser is not new to this game. A journalist by trade, he cut his teeth in politics while organizing against Germany’s adoption of the Euro during the 1990s. By 2010, when Germany prepared to bail out Greece to prevent a financial crisis in the country, he had gained experience in holding protests. That year, Gläser organized a “Berlin Tea Party,” where about 20 people emptied jars of Greek olives into Berlin’s Spree river in imitation of America’s infamous Boston Tea Party and its contemporary Republican-party revival. Three years later, the AfD was founded with a similar anti-establishment purpose. Gläser joined the party and was elected to Berlin’s state parliament on its roster in 2016.  

Since then, he has worked to package AfD’s messaging in a politically palatable format. As AfD’s representative on media issues, he hosts movie nights biweekly and other community events. 

[TO EXPAND HERE!!! With more events, grassroots activities.]

 This kind of grassroots work distinguishes AfD from its mainstream counterparts, according to Jan-Werner Müller, a Politics professor at Princeton University. “That party has had a very strong local, on-the ground-presence,” he said, contrasting AfD’s approach with that of more its more mainstream counterparts.

 To people worried about associating with far-right extremists, social events with listening sessions can be a way to feel more welcome into the party. People who may be deterred by the prospect of engaging with fringe actors or “neo-Nazis” on the right “if it turns out they’re all nice—they’re your nice neighbors who are helping you address a real-world issue—that changes the perception,” Müller said.

 Toward the night’s close, a woman who helped produce the documentary stood up to thank Gläser for his work. “This event, close to the citizens,” she said, “is so important because you do your job to educate, to process and above all to bring people together.”

 “The AfD is the only party that is involved for us people,” she added. After she finished speaking, the room burst into applause.

***

Where I’m going from here:

1. Section about engagement with voters with a migrant background — quotes from Kohler and Eschricht
2. Section about youth voters
3. End with youth org forming in November
4. I also need to sprinkle in information about AfD’s difficulties actually governing in parliament — being blocked from committees, etc.

Christopher Tamm, 25, is sitting on a chair next to an anti-racism bench in Germany as he looks at the camera wearing sunglasses in an Instagram post dated March, 2025. In the caption, Tamm has included the calculation for the estimated cost for the “so-called ‘benches against racism: no room for racism—for diversity!’” as he criticizes their installation using taxpayer money. 

In July, Tamm posted a photo of himself sitting on a couch, reading a book titled “Remigration,” and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. “Remigration” is a term used by the far-right to express support for state sanctioned mass deportation for immigrants. 

In mid-September, Tamm is pictured at a vigil for Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, with the caption #whitelivesmatter. In an accompanying post, Tamm says that Iryna did not receive public embrace after her death because she was white. 

Tamm’s most popular post, which has received over two million views, was published in late January. In this compilation video, several people introduce themselves with their pronouns including they/them, followed by Tamm’s commentary that he is “right (straight) and German.”

Tamm is one of many German social media influencers for the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD party was formed in 2013 as a single-issue party in response to global financial crisis policies that provided bailouts for struggling countries. The AfD promoted beliefs of nationalism that have intensified over the years, with their focus shifting to immigration issues in 2015. 

During the Syrian Civil War, the German government had opened its doors to refugees seeking asylum. Many families were driven from their homes, and the Assad government tortured many who did not support the authoritarian regime. Almost 300,000 Syrian refugees entered Germany in 2015, with an overall 46% migration increase from 2014. Amid this major immigration influx, the AfD shifted focus to anti-immigration politics and began dramatically increasing their party support. 

Tamm resonates with key AfD messaging, specifically “remigration.” He feels that immigrants, specifically Muslim practicing immigrants, do not belong in German society.

“If you’re somebody who wants to wear a hijab, you don’t fit into Germany.”

Though Germany does not recognize any specific religion, many women are discriminated against for wearing a hijab, and certain states have banned women from wearing hijabs in government, public education, and clerical positions. While Tamm believes a hijab is a symbol of female suppression, many Muslim women disagree. 

Tamm said that immigrants should migrate to countries in which they are most culturally similar, and that leaving one’s country due to hardship was “weak.” For many Syrians, however, Germany offered the greatest promise for opportunity and leaving Syria was not a matter of choice, as they faced torture. 

To recruit others to the AfD cause, Tamm has taken to posting images and short-form videos on social media. He sports a coiffed short cut with a sharp side part and a short mustache and beard. Along with several “remigration” posts and messages in support of the MAGA movement, Tamm also targets LGBT+ groups. 

Though LGBT+ sentiment is mixed within the AfD, and party co-leader Alice Weidel is openly lesbian, anti-immigration messages are uniform throughout. Influencers like Tamm, who is only 25, have helped generate a new wave of AfD support primarily from young, white German men. 

Jasmine, who is a graduate student in Berlin, noticed her younger brother has been pulled to the political right by his social media feed. Her brother, a 17-year-old who now lives in the US but was born in Germany, has been telling her that more deportations are needed and immigrants are going to “replace us in the culture.” She believes that social media algorithms can “indoctrinate you into [an] anti-migrant racist.”

She also explained how the AfD made refugees “scapegoats” for a wide range of problems, as the party advertised that “if we stop the migrants coming in, then suddenly everything will be better.” And far too many, she believes, fell for this promise that she considers a trap.

For Tamm, he wears provocation as a badge of honor: “I like to be the provocateur.” Tamm approaches his social media posts like a “business” with his videos making fun of left wing beliefs. “If you want to be successful, you have to do something that nobody is doing, and you have to find a niche that isn’t occupied. I found a niche with my provocative videos.” 

Provocation is not an idea unique to the AfD party. In the US, the MAGA movement has been using similar strategies to attract younger male voters, and the Trump administration has similarly cracked down on illegal immigrants. It is unsurprising that the two groups have begun to show signs of unity. 

Back in early 2025, Vance spoke out against the firewall that had formed in Germany against the AfD, stating that it was challenging free speech in the country. 

Since then, Deputy leader of the AfD Beatrix von Storch and AfD Politician from western Germany Joachim Paul had a meeting in September with representatives of the national security council, the vice president’s office and the State Department. Most recently, German influencer and MAGA advisor Alex Bruesewitz visited Berlin in early November and spoke with AfD leaders about their shared goals. 

The spreading popularity of this movement was on full display following the assasination of social media influencer and far-right supporter Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, as protests and gatherings drew large crowds across the country and in Europe. 

Country leaders and officials have posted reactions to Kirk’s death, many of which are aligned with the far-right rhetoric. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the left as “hate mongering,” Santiago Abascal, a Congressman in Spain, wrote that the left “wanted this assasination,” and Germany’s Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD party, posted on X that “liberal’s hate the left’s way of life.” 

“I am totally not surprised that a party like the AfD that’s still on its way up trying to take power, is going to try to learn everything it can from ideologues and activists in other countries who are singing from the same sheet of music,” one former Foreign Service Officer in the Department of State told me.

From here, my plan is to move into AfD ties with Russia then concerns about antisemitism. End with kicker of Tamm at protest in Nazi salute. 

On the morning of March 31, 2025, Ekaterina Fomina waited anxiously in Berlin. She was expecting a message from her lawyer, Yulia Kuznetsova, with an update on her case. It was only the fourth session, and her lawyer had not yet been allowed to present their defence.

Then her phone flashed. It was not her lawyer, but a colleague. More notifications followed. Fomina’s name began to appear across Russian media. Within half an hour, the Moscow court handling her case had sentenced her in absentia to eight and a half years in prison for “spreading fake news” about the Russian army, one of the heaviest penalties under the law.

“I was crying a lot,” she said. “Because it is not about committing a crime and receiving a fair sentence. It is about realizing that your country calls you a terrorist.”

Berlin, where Fomina now lives, has become the informal capital of this fractured press in exile. Since the war began, hundreds of Russian journalists have relocated to the city, supported by a fragile network of advocacy groups and NGOs. From co-working spaces and temporary studios, they continue to publish and broadcast for audiences that often need VPNs to access their content. Yet safety abroad comes with a different kind of constraint: distance. The very freedom that allows them to keep speaking also severs their connection to the country they are speaking about.

The rise of Berlin as a media hub is inseparable from the collapse of independent journalism inside Russia. The transformation began in February 2022, when nearly every major outlet that reported on the invasion was blocked, branded a “foreign agent,” or forced to shut down. Article 207.3, the “fake news” law, criminalised any reporting that contradicted the Ministry of Defense. 

TK Grigore Pop-Eleches / someone else on Russian media ecosystem and how it isolates and fosters distrust towards independent media

Fomina’s sentence is part of this sweeping campaign to silence independent journalists who reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  As domestic space for journalism collapsed, the profession reassembled itself abroad. Outlets that once operated in Moscow or St. Petersburg now produce their work from Riga, Vilnius, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, and especially Berlin. TK quote on how this dynamic works

Against this backdrop, Fomina’s own reporting stands out. A former reporter for Important Stories and now a documentary producer for the Russian-language TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain), she had long expected prosecution. She had investigated war crimes in Bucha and Andreevka during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One Russian soldier confessed to her that he had killed a civilian, and she verified the victim’s identity. “There could not be any coincidences in this situation,” she said. “But the truth does not matter for this case.”

Understanding her conviction requires understanding the logic of the system that produced it. Reading the case materials, what struck her most was how easily the state could assemble a conviction. “They even did not know how to write Bucha,” she said. “They wrote it with a mistake.” When she saw that the male voiceover from the video had been attributed to her, she understood that accuracy had no place in the proceedings. “They simply did not care,” she explained.

For Fomina, this confirmed something she had sensed long before the verdict. “I actually realised how other cases are built,” she said. “There is no evidence of people’s guilt. They simply can say in the case ‘she is against the regime.’” At a certain point, the legal details barely matter because the outcome is already defined. “The decision was written in advance,” she stated.

TK on how these trials work and what consequences have on reception of the journalists’ work.

TK how some journalists are discouraged from their profession → Anastasia Kortokova (not getting credit for her work)?

Berlin’s emergence as a media center is visible in the rhythms of daily work. Reporters who once worked in established newsrooms now move between borrowed offices. A network of NGOs supports them by offering co-working spaces and financial, legal, and emotional support. For newly arrived reporters, these spaces are often the first sign that a profession still exists for them. Danila Bedyaev, who helps run the NGO MiCT’s Exile Media Hub in Grunewald, described the early months after the invasion as a period of relentless arrivals. TK more on NGO support networks. Many came with only a backpack and a laptop, unsure of how long they would stay or whether they would ever work again. Berlin offered neither stability nor guarantees, but it offered a starting point. “People could walk in and know they were not alone,” he said. For many, that mattered as much as the practical support.

Yet the city’s role is not only logistical. It has become a cultural and psychological center as well. Exiled journalists spend their days reporting on a country they cannot return to, for an audience that cannot openly read or watch them. The collapse of domestic journalism has transformed their work into something more fragmented and improvisational. Teams coordinate across time zones. Producers cut footage in Berlin from material recorded secretly in Russia. Reporters verify stories through encrypted calls, blurred screenshots, and documents sent anonymously through Telegram.

Berlin is also a place where the emotional cost of exile becomes visible. Nearly everyone describes a version of the same split. They live in one society while working entirely inside another. They follow two news cycles, carry two contexts in their heads, and write for a country whose physical landscape they no longer inhabit (change, repetitive). TK quote Anastasia Korotkova and spotlight on her.

Exile forces a reconsideration of politics and identity. TKTKTKTK. The story of Russian journalism in Berlin is not just the story of flight but of reconstruction.

In Russia, the accused disappear. In exile, Fomina found that her only defense was to keep talking.

Notes: include more journalists earlier

By the time Tahmina Ataee arrived at Bard College Berlin, she had already studied under three education systems, crossed two borders, and learned four languages. But the opportunity that once made her journey possible has disappeared for nearly all Afghan girls, as the door that once led to education and brighter futures is being forcibly shut.

Over the past two decades, a remarkable generation of Afghan women proved what was possible when educational doors were open. As Afghan sociologist Abdul Wahid Gulrani explains, the transformation of women’s education after 2001 was not simply academic. “Girls who grew up in dusty courtyards and unsafe neighborhoods suddenly entered classrooms, universities, and public life. They became teachers, journalists, and community leaders,” he said. For women like Tahmina, it meant the chance to imagine a different future.

Today, Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are forbidden to girls and women, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The agency estimates in 2025 that “nearly 2.2 million girls are now barred from attending school beyond the primary level,” a reality UNESCO warns “almost wiped out” two decades of steady progress for education in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, “women have been banned from universities” since December 2022, cutting off one of the few pathways for higher learning, UNESCO reports. The consequences of these actions are profound. UNESCO estimates the “suspension of women’s higher education alone is expected to cost the country up to US$9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066.”

Today, formal schooling for many Afghan girls has been driven into hiding. According to NPR, some teenage girls now attend secret tutoring centers hidden in basements and private homes, where they study English, the Quran, and high-school level subjects. As Gulrani observes, “education in Afghanistan is not dead, it has gone underground.” “Across the country, girls continue to study secretly in homes, basements, and informal community classes. Some are taking online courses through their phones and laptops. Mothers are teaching daughters at home,” Gulrani said. This quiet but resilient movement, he says, shows that “while the Taliban can close schools, they cannot extinguish the will to learn.”

In this landscape of shrinking horizons, stories like Tahmina Ataee’s stand out as a glimpse of the talent and ambition now at risk. In Kabul, her education reflected the mix of schools that emerged after 2001, when private, international, and public institutions expanded opportunities for girls. She first attended a global private school, then an all-girls Turkish high school where, as she put it, “we had to learn everything twice, once in Persian and once in English.” She even enrolled in an American university in Kabul before her education was disrupted by the Taliban takeover.

Ataee’s path is not unusual for her generation. She is part of a generation of Afghan women whose lives were shaped by two decades of expanded access to education. Between 2001 and 2021, millions of girls entered classrooms for the first time as private and international schools opened alongside a growing public system. Many of those students later left the country, some as refugees and others on scholarships; however, their education enabled them to build new futures abroad.

Still, national progress often masked the realities inside individual classrooms. For Ataee, the experience looked very different from many of her peers. In Kabul, her classmates were often the daughters of politicians and businessmen, while she was the only Hazara student in her grade. The difference, she said, wasn’t only social. “They put a lot of emphasis on religion and like religious practice,” she said. “We even had a mosque inside the school. That was uncommon.”

Religious expectations felt unfamiliar to her. “I have not grown up to be like that,” she said. “My dad is a very, very non-religious person. My mom has had a bit of a background, but she’s also chill.” Yet pressure to conform was constant. “It’s also not peer pressure, but I guess it is, because they’d be like, oh, it’s lunch break, we have an hour-long lunch, and I would go eat first, but they’re like, no, we have to go pray,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it brainwash, but I was also traumatized, so I would call it that.”

At home, faith mattered less than education. Her father, who worked for a German nonprofit in Afghanistan, encouraged her to focus on learning. Tahmina recalls her father asking, “why would you like believe in such things?” Among Hazara families, this emphasis on education was common. “Not only just my family but friends I know and also relatives, they put a lot of emphasis on education,” she said. “They always like push their kids to study.”

Tahmina’s education was interrupted when the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021. “We had to leave everything behind,” she said. “We used to live in a flat, and then everything we owned was gone. I don’t have that sort of attachment to materials anymore.” With help from her father’s German employer, her family left Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to Germany. “We were one of the first families they got out,” she said.

Arriving in Germany, Tahmina recalled, “it was a bit chaotic when we got here as well, because they thought we were undocumented or, like, illegally entering, which was not the case.” They spent their first weeks in quarantine camps, navigating new rules and procedures. “It was scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “One day they’d wake you up to do blood tests or like very procedural things, but like to us, I was like, what are we doing?”

As they settled, Tahmina continued her studies online. Before leaving Afghanistan, she had been enrolled “in an American school,” she said. “Then, because of the whole takeover, they were like, okay, our current students can continue their studies online without any tuition, so that’s how I was able to do two semesters while I was in Germany.”

When the university reopened a branch in Qatar, she realized she could not continue there. “I was like, this is not going to happen because I’d have to be there,” she said. “My brother was like, oh, there’s a branch here, you can apply.” At the time, she was learning German and preparing to apply to a local university. “Everyone had the same sort of plan,” she said. “You study German, get to university level, and then apply to a German school. That was my idea of how it’s going to be.” Ultimately, Bard College Berlin offered a different path. “I applied and I checked and I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got accepted,” she said, laughing.

Now at Bard, Tahmina is excelling academically, consistently earning top grades. She is also channeling her experience into research on Afghanistan’s brain drain, investigating why the country’s brightest students and professionals leave and how the loss of educated women affects Afghan society. “I’m trying to understand how the talent that was built in the country can be sustained, there is not a lot of research on it,” she said.

For Tahmina, this research is deeply personal. The barriers she faced in Afghanistan, and the millions of girls whose education is now stifled, inform her understanding of what is at stake. Her work highlights both the potential of educated women and the societal cost when that potential is denied. She hopes her future job will do more than study the problem as she hopes to work for an organization that helps people.