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.
