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.
