Author: Valerio Castellini (Page 1 of 2)

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.

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

John McPhee says writers should “earn their images,” that the work of writing is to see precisely, not decorate vaguely. The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail and Aleppo After the Fall, respectively by Dan Barry and Robert Worth, are exactly doing that, stripping big, exhausted subjects (sex work, war) of abstraction by shrinking them to human scale.

Barry’s story starts mid-fall: a woman, SiSi, plunging from a fourth-floor balcony in Queens. It’s the kind of scene that could’ve been tabloid, but Barry slows it down. He rewinds time, reconstructing her world with the rotisserie chicken from Kissena Boulevard, the WeChat calls to her brother, the cat figurine waving beside the door. Every detail insists that she existed, that she occupied a specific corner of New York. In McPhee’s terms, Barry builds a frame of reference sturdy enough to hold empathy, without borrowed drama or moralizing, just the patient mapping of one life against the system that erased it.

Worth’s Aleppo After the Fall is very similar in this sense. Where Barry writes about a woman in a city too alive to notice her, Worth writes about a man in a city emptied of everything. Abu Sami, who stayed through the siege of Aleppo, has survived four years alone drinking boiled rainwater, reading Freud by candlelight, tending a grapevine. He’s both utterly ordinary and mythic. Through him, Worth reveals a nation’s ruin without ever saying so directly. The politics—Russia, Assad, the rebels—blur at the edges, while the clarity is limited to Abu Sami’s courtyard, in the sunlight filtering through shrapnel holes.

Both pieces follow McPhee’s idea that the writer’s loyalty is to the observed world, not to the headline. Barry’s Queens and Worth’s Aleppo couldn’t be further apart, but both are written from the same position, a few steps back.

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, a former reporter for Important Stories and now a documentary producer for the Russian-language TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain), 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.”

When the verdict came, Fomina decided to speak publicly about her prosecution, something few defendants in Russia can do. “Those who are arrested cannot defend themselves,” she explained. “So I started covering my own case, showing how absurd it is.” In one video, she called one of the supposed witnesses who had testified against her, a man who had never met her but accused her of “hurting patriotic feelings.” On the call, he at first did not remember who she was. When she told him, he laughed and said she had “deserved it.”

“It is so absurd,” Fomina said. “The man who decided my destiny could not even recognize my face.”

Fomina’s sentence is part of a sweeping campaign to silence independent journalists who reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The “fake news” law, adopted in March 2022, criminalized any information about the military that diverged from official statements. In the two years since, it has become the main legal instrument for targeting reporters, editors, and even ordinary citizens who documented the war’s realities. 

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.

For Fomina, the verdict did not change her physical circumstances, but it marked an irreversible shift. She could no longer think of herself as a journalist working outside Russia—she had become one who could never go back.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Berlin has become home to a fragmented but resilient community of exiled Russian journalists. Scattered across the city, they are trying to rebuild a profession in conditions that blur work and survival.

Among them is Anastasia Korotkova, who left after her outlet TV Rain was labeled a “foreign agent.” She now works in Berlin alongside other displaced media professionals, trying to maintain a connection to an audience back home that can barely access their work. Ekaterina Fomina, once an investigative correspondent for Important Stories, fled after releasing an interview in which a Russian soldier confessed to war crimes: she continues reporting from abroad despite an 8-year sentence awaiting for her in Russia, and the distance forces her to rely on a web of anonymous sources and encrypted messages. Danila Bedyaev, formerly a local radio host in Yaroslavl, now helps coordinate practical support for others through the MiCT Exile Media Hub, where displaced journalists share workspace, training, and grants.

The piece explores how exile reshapes not only their journalism but also their sense of self. Based in Berlin, they work to preserve networks inside Russia that remain irreplaceable sources of information, all while navigating Germany’s slow bureaucracy and the constant awareness that someone could be watching. Putin’s regime has reached deep into Europe before, and nowhere feels entirely safe.

Rather than portraying exile as a single political statement, the story approaches the unique case of journalists as a daily practice of endurance, mutual help, and stubborn professionalism. These reporters no longer define themselves by access to Russia, but by the act of continuing to publish despite it. In Berlin, they start their days with headlines from a country that no longer wants them, and end them hoping someone back home is still reading.

I’ve been thinking about how the unique trait of longform stories is that they don’t simply tell you what happened, but make you understand why people acted the way they did, or how something big feels up close. It’s a much more introspective form than news that gives you the facts in motion. Longform slows them down, rewinds them, and asks what they reveal about people and systems once the noise dies down. It’s journalism that doesn’t rush to close the file, because the editorial function is so inherently different.

Pamela Colloff’s story is about corruption, but what really sticks is the slow pace of it, and how small compromises pile up until a man might die because of someone’s performance in court. The piece doesn’t rush to outrage, and instead it lets you sit in the absurd normality of the system. It’s almost boring at first, and that’s the point. By the time the story opens up, you realise the horror isn’t just the lie, but how routine the lie became.

Jennifer Senior’s essay on Bobby McIlvaine does something similar but with grief instead of injustice. There’s no clean shape to it. No beginning, middle, and end. It’s full of detours: family arguments, memories, other people’s versions of the same story. But that’s how grief actually works. You read it and think that’s what loss sounds like when everyone’s trying to make sense of the same silence in different ways.

Kathryn Schulz’s earthquake piece works on the opposite end. She’s talking about a disaster that hasn’t happened yet. Still, she writes it like it already has, tracing the science and history until the “when, not if” feels personal. Paradoxically, I did not find it particularly sensational. It’s just steady, calm, and terrifying because of it.

The Ukraine piece is all about how governments try to get ahead of a story, and how information becomes part of the battlefield. It’s fast, reactive, almost like a news feed, but still grounded in people making impossible choices in real time.

Reading all these together, what struck me most was how they’re all wrestling with control: who has it, who loses it, and how stories themselves are a form of it. Each writer builds structure out of something messy and uncertain.

John McPhee said structure in nonfiction “causes people to want to keep turning pages,” but it also feels like a way to hold chaos still just long enough to look at it. These pieces don’t pretend to solve anything. They just give the mess a shape so we can stand it for a little while, and maybe understand it better before it starts moving again.

Many of this week’s readings made me think a lot about what we’ve talked about in the Dart Centre sessions about safety, empathy, and the emotional cost of witnessing. Each story, in its own way, showed how reporting in high-risk situations requires extensive preparation and ethics: how to stay safe, how to stay human, and how to tell the truth without turning someone else’s trauma into your material.

Caitlin Dickerson’s reporting on the Darién Gap feels like a textbook example of what the Dart trainers meant when they talked about trauma-informed reporting. She meets and reports on migrants as people, rather than victims. You can feel that she’s careful and aware of the power imbalance between a reporter who can leave and the people who can’t. When she describes the jungle swallowing bodies, she’s not trying to shock the reader, and instead asks them to understand what policy really looks like on the ground.

The same awareness of what it means to enter someone else’s crisis runs through The Embeds from CJR. The journalists there talk about living with military units, witnessing raids and violence, and the strange blur that happens when you’re too close to the story. Colonel William Darley mentions that every embed is like “seeing the war through a straw.” It’s exactly what the Dart people meant about perspective: access is not the same as understanding. You can be there, literally in the middle of it, and still miss the bigger truth if you forget to step back.

Caitlin Doornbos’ Ukraine reporting felt like another side of the same lesson. She talks about needing to “go to the scene” because she couldn’t tell the story from behind a desk. But she also reminds us that showing up doesn’t mean throwing yourself into danger blindly. It’s easy to romanticize bravery in journalism, but her reporting makes it clear that responsibility is part of it too. You protect yourself so you can keep telling stories.

All these stories circle back to what the Dart Centre kept emphasizing: journalism is relational. You have to think about what your presence does to the people you’re covering—and to you. The best work doesn’t come from detachment, but from respect. Rather than being fearless, it’s about being careful, and still choosing to look.

The plane lifted through a pale, cloudless sky above Moscow, one of the last few to leave as sanctions grounded almost everything else. Inside the cabin, Ivan Kondratenko sat tightly, his backpack under the seat, watching the snowbanks along the runway quickly blur into motion. “When our plane was getting off there was like this huge sigh,” he recalled. “I had honestly, psychologically, a feeling of great relief.” Below, the city that had shaped his politics and his fears receded into the frozen dark.

At 42, he packed only what fit into that backpack, believing he would be gone for a couple weeks at most. It was late evening on March 3rd, 2022, nine days after he had woken in a fever and discovered that Russia had invaded Ukraine.

Three years later, Kondratenko sips a cappuccino in a small café in Gesundbrunnen, the Berlin neighborhood where he studies German. His curly hair has begun to gray. Berlin has become a kind of home, though never his own. Around him, thousands of Russian dissidents and journalists have built parallel lives in exile. They are the aftershock of a system that criminalized dissent and exported its silence abroad: the unintended diaspora of a country that could no longer bear its conscience. For Ivan and many others, persecution has travelled with them, even when they left Russia, and their lives, behind.

A native of Oryol, a Russian oblast close to the Ukrainian border, Ivan Kondratenko had devoted most of his life up to 2022 to political activism. After moving to Moscow in 2012 following his studies, he began working for the Moscow office of Amnesty International in 2014, eventually becoming its Acting Director until 2018. “It had a tiny office of five employees,” he explained. “I was very young.”

The morning of February 24th felt unreal. Kondratenko had just come back to Moscow from a work trip to Berlin, where he had also received a Pfizer dose of the Covid vaccine. Sweating profusely from the fever, he woke up confused, and started scrolling the news on his phone. The blue light from the screen flickered faintly on his face, as he struggled to understand what he was reading. “It all felt like a fever nightmare,” he said. “I didn’t know if I could trust myself.” Before dawn, President Putin had announced the beginning of the infamous “special military operation.”

During those nine days leading up to March 3rd, Kondratenko travelled back to Oryol to visit his parents. He put some anti-war leaflets up on streetpoles there. But, most importantly, he bought coffee. A lot of it. To this day, the coffee is still sitting in his Moscow apartment. He relied on a German experience from World War Two, when the country was struck by a shortage. “I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to leave Russia,” he explained. He hoped he wouldn’t have to.

When the police started detaining those who were attending the protests, Kondratenko started rationalising the situation. “You could either run away, or get caught,” he said. “Panic was growing that the border would be closed down.” On March 2nd, he bought a one-way ticket to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The following day, amidst fear as flights were held to the ground, he boarded the plane and looked back at the lights of Moscow flattened against the snow, not knowing it would be his last time.

Bishkek, for a few weeks, felt like a reprieve. He shared a small hotel room with former colleagues, working remotely and trying to stay connected to the world they’d left.

Awareness that exile was no longer an interlude but a life grew slowly. Three weeks later, when colleagues suggested he join them in Berlin, the decision felt almost casual. “I had a feeling I would stay there for a couple of weeks,” he said again, smiling at the irony. “Let’s see what happens next.”

He landed in Berlin at the end of March, but his stay only lasted a week. “I realised it would be very difficult to legalise myself first in Germany,” he explained. Like many others, he decided to leave for Georgia, where the border was still open to Russians. “It was easy to get there,” he said. “I had many friends there.” 

He would spend six months in Georgia. For a while, it seemed like the war—and exile—might still be temporary. “In summer 2022,” he said, “it felt like I could just travel to Moscow—kind of dangerous but still possible.” That illusion faded quickly. By autumn, arrests were mounting for social-media posts, and the mobilization decrees made return impossible. “I was also in Maidan in 2013 and 2014”, he explained. “I said, ‘I have a record.’ If they start mass arrests, I would be a good candidate for that.”

The path that would bring him back to Berlin came, as he put it, “very random.” A colleague mentioned a new German program offering humanitarian visas for Russian civil-society workers. He wrote to the officials running it, attaching a one-page account of his work and life. “And then it was silence for several months,” he said. One day, he received a message: please come and bring your passport. 

He was among the first to receive one of such visas. He officially relocated to Germany, where through the NGOs he was working with he helped others apply, drafting dozens of letters attesting that particular journalists or activists were “in danger” and should qualify for the visa.

In Berlin, Kondratenko moved into the House of Critical Voices, a residence for exiled media workers managed by the NGO MiCT. It is a place of constant proximity, where journalists, activists, and artists orbit one another’s routines.

Some kept producing articles and campaigns out of habit, but many others, including Kondratenko, the distance hollowed the work itself. 

Danila Bedyaev, once a producer at Echo of Moscow, now keeps the lights running in the same building. “I’m the tech guy,” he said, “responsible for everything you can plug into power.” When he arrived with his wife and two small children, he imagined journalism would resume once the shock passed. “We thought it was temporary,” he said. “Two, three months—such craziness can’t continue.” But the war did continue, and the profession that had once defined him became a luxury. His wife, Lyudmila Shabueva, also a journalist, still tries to stay in the field, hosting a small monthly Russian-language radio show. In Germany, though, there is little space for Russian journalists in exile—too many voices, too little demand. The work survives as habit, not livelihood.

MiCT, supported by the German Ministry of Culture, created the infrastructure of the exile press. Coworking studios, legal counsel, emergency stipends. “Because no one wanted these people to stay on the street,” explained Bedyaev. The program kept dozens afloat, though it also revealed a harder truth: aid can sustain a community, but it cannot restore its purpose.

In the past three years, Berlin’s Russian-speaking exile community developed its own microclimate. One of nervous solidarity. Mental strain and professional burnout became shared conditions. “People feel stuck,” Kondratenko said. “They don’t see any future… It’s a very nervous community these days.” Yet he also described small rituals that allow them to endure. Weekend retreats in German villages, seminars, conversations that oscillate between despair and dark humor. “We do regular meetings, self-organised with my friends,” he said. “It’s both to have fun and a way we manage it.”

Over time, activism gave way to literature, a dormant passion in Kondratenko’s life. The NGOs he had worked for either collapsed or released him, and he began receiving state support while studying German and finishing a degree in creative writing.

His first novel—a blend of fiction and autobiography—draws from his years in human rights work and the experience of exile. “I’m trying to explain my generation,” he said. The book, recently accepted by a small publisher, follows young Russians who believed that one more protest, one more petition, might end authoritarianism. “We said, ‘Let’s do a little bit more effort, life will change, Putin will go,’ and then we found out it’s so difficult.”

Writing, for him, became both mirror and refuge. “Literature is something very important for me,” he said. “It’s how I can maintain my connection with my motherland somehow.” He has started attending Russian literary circles in Berlin and dreams of writing in English too, one day, inspired by Nabokov. 

In Berlin, his days are organized around language classes in the morning and writing in the afternoon. But the war still shapes every silence. “It’s very shocking that this horrible war [has been] going on for three and a half years,” he said. “The Second World War… was going on for less than four [EN: for Russia].”

He no longer speaks about return. “I think actually this sort of exile provides a good distance,” he said. “But of course, exile also means a little bit of loneliness… sometimes I feel alone.” Distance, after all, was how he’d learned to live—and to look back.

The coffee he bought before fleeing Russia is still in his kitchen cupboard in Moscow, sealed and forgotten. It has survived three winters, waiting in a city he no longer recognises.

I approached the readings for this week more methodologically as I’m thinking about how to structure my own profile. I’m planning to write about Ivan, a Russian activist and writer now living in Berlin after a troubled personal journey that in many ways hunts him to this day. Both Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives” and Peter Hessler’s “What the Garbageman Knows” helped me think about how to write about someone’s everyday life without overexplaining it. They approach people in very different ways: Deb through immersion, Hessler through close observation and patience. Both methods feel relevant as I figure out how to approach Ivan’s story. I think the biggest challenge is to understand how to portray the suffering in his story without “dumping” all of his trauma onto the page, but still acknowledging and dignifying it.

Deb’s piece works through proximity. She brings the reader into the Damascus nightclub without preface—the smoke, sequins, and noise come first, and the politics stay in the background. What stood out to me is how she doesn’t frame the women as “subjects” or “issues.” Their personalities come through in details: how they fix their makeup, trade photos of their children, and walk into the club like they’re stepping into another life. The writing feels respectful but unsentimental. Deb lets us understand their choices through the rhythm of the night, there is no commentary. For Ivan, I want to follow that same approach. He has this mix of irony and vulnerability that I think works best when shown in small moments, like when he jokes that literature is “a parasite that can eat all your time.”

Hessler’s piece is more methodical. He builds Sayyid’s world slowly, through repetition and return, but always adding something new that helps us to frame him. His writing feels steadier, almost invisible. While Deb’s story unfolds over a single night, Hessler’s happens over months of small interactions. He shows how a person can be both ordinary and essential: Sayyid isn’t described as a symbol of resilience, but by the end, we understand how much he holds the city together. That kind of patience is something I’d like to borrow for Ivan’s profile. His thoughts about exile, writing, and activism accumulated naturally during our conversation, they were not forced into a single theme, and I hope to convey this.

The main difference, I think, is that Deb writes from the inside out, while Hessler writes from the outside in, noticing the patterns around someone until a fuller picture appears. I can see both sides applying to Ivan: he’s introspective and articulate (which invites that closer, inside view), but his life also reflects a broader story of displacement and adaptation that could be shown through his surroundings.

Both readings reminded me that profiles don’t have to be dramatic or conclusive. They can just sit with a person’s contradictions—like Deb’s dancers balancing survival and dignity, or Hessler’s garbageman finding structure in chaos. For Ivan, that contradiction might be between his old identity as an activist and his new one as a writer, and I hope to write in a way that makes space for both.

By Cora LeCates 

October 14th, 2025

 

BERLIN—Tonight, our class filled up the entire indoor seating area at Ebn Tamshah–a Palestinian restaurant in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood. Inside, mosaic lanterns and tapestries are layered against portraits of Che Guevara and Shireen Abu Akleh; decorative mirrors and ceramic plates framed pictures of the owners’ family. The evening was dedicated to a conversation with journalists Joshua Yaffa, Jakub Laichter, and Barbara Demick. 

Over plates of pita and pitchers of lemonade, we took turns discussing our ideas and plans for migration reporting this week in Berlin. As we were still in the first few days of the trip, shaking off jet lag and locking down our sources, some projects were in more certain states than others. Nonetheless, every piece offered a distinct lens on the story of migration in Germany, blending political and legal concerns with the more humanitarian, sociological, or religious elements of migrant communities. Some of us are interested in Palestinians or Afghans, while others are choosing to write about Ukrainians or Syrians. Still others veer into the more political realm, tracking manifestations of right-wing extremism in local football clubs, or reporting on the rising popularity of the AfD amongst German youth. 

Occasionally, overhearing our conversation, Rayk Nabil—our waiter, and the son of the chef at Ebn Tamshah—would chime in with a word on his own experiences. Nabil is well-acquainted with the political landscape for migrants in Germany at present. He studied history in school, and his social world includes a network of many migrants from different parts of the world. Hearing our interests in residents of Berlin from different backgrounds, he recommended several friends for interviews off the top of his head. The combination of the advice of Joshua and Barbara and the serendipitous input from Nabil reminded me of a phrase we’d heard earlier today in a very different context: “Coincidence and circumstance.” 

At the German Historical Museum, our afternoon tour of the “Roads Not Taken” exhibit provided a compelling—if controversial—lens for looking at German history. The exhibit’s overarching premise, our guide explained, is to outline centuries of German history with an eye on alternative outcomes. What were the key moments in German history where a single decision shaped the lives of millions? Where were its most important mistakes or accidents? And what might have happened if German leaders had chosen differently? The exhibit views the study of history as an examination of a long series of decisions—and their repercussions. In a country with a history as influential and haunted as Germany’s, the exhibit is daring. 

“Coincidence and circumstance,” our guide kept repeating this afternoon, arguing that these two elements were responsible for some of the most transformative, catalytic, or devastating moments in human history. I disagree. A national history cannot be illustrated as merely a series of forks in the road; there are too many people implicated and involved in its every event and “decision” to allow for such a reductive portrayal. Especially in the country responsible for, as our guide himself called it, “the singular insanity of human history” that was the Holocaust, the notion that entertaining alternative histories might be worthwhile can seem insensitive—or, at minimum, a fruitless attempt to imagine what might have been. 

Still, our dinner conversation today emphasized the importance of “coincidence and circumstance” on the level of the individual, and indeed for the profession of journalism. Joshua and Barbara underscored the importance of critical, uncontrollable factors in their own careers, from the timing of a story to the unpredictable or erratic behaviors of their sources. Meanwhile, the very setting of Ebn Tamshah, and Nabil’s coincidental connections to many of our stories, spoke to the huge potential value of random events and circumstances in reporting work. Journalism is challenging because it is so unpredictable—yet, this volatile quality is also what makes it exciting. 

Today’s activities reminded me to approach the remainder of our time in Berlin with coincidence and circumstance in mind—to control, as far as I can, the conditions in my reporting, and to keep an eye out for leads and stories wherever they might appear.