Masha Gessen - How Russian Journalists in Exile Are Covering the War in Ukraine

for displaying a map of Russia that included the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula; and for its journalists’ repeated use of the phrase “our military” to refer to the Russian armed forces. Editors at TV Rain told me that an illustrator had turned in the map so late that no one had had a chance to check it, but that the use of “our military” was no mistake: it was an acknowledgment of responsibility. To some Latvians, however, it sounded like a statement of allegiance.

By the time of Korostelev’s broadcast, on Thursday, December 1st, TV Rain was facing thousands of euros in fines. The following day, a clip of his slipup spread on social media. It seemed like proof of something many in Latvia had suspected all along—even Russians who claimed to oppose the Kremlin were secretly supporting its war in Ukraine. “So it turns out this was all part of the ‘special operation,’ ” one typical tweet read. “This was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Ekaterina Kotrikadze, TV Rain’s news director, opened that afternoon’s broadcast of “Here and Now” with a clarification and an apology. “The phrase used by Korostelev was factually wrong and absolutely unacceptable to the entire editorial team of TV Rain,” she said. “We oppose Russia’s war in Ukraine. We consider this war to be criminal and vile, and we consider the draft criminal and senseless. Our goal is to get this message across to every single one of our viewers, to as many people as possible. We cannot allow wording that may cast doubt on our position, and for this reason”—Kotrikadze swallowed—“we have decided to stop working with Alexey Korostelev, starting today.” Her speech slowed and she appeared about to cry. “To all those people who have had to flee their homes, to all who have experienced Russian aggression firsthand,” she said, “we ask for your forgiveness.”

It was a flawless apology. But in the world of social media, as in the world of live television, everything is iterative. More clarifications and apologies followed—from TV Rain’s editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dzyadko, and its founder, Natalia Sindeeva—with each subsequent statement sounding less apologetic, more defensive. That afternoon, Korostelev posted on Telegram, “Do I feel sorry for hungry conscripts who have been abandoned by everyone? I do. Is Putin a great guy? He is not. This seems to be the waterline. Do I help the conscripts? Only by reporting on them.”

I visited TV Rain’s studio in Amsterdam in late November, both as a reporter and as an on-air guest. I chatted with the makeup artist working on me, a thirty-one-year-old named Anastasia Pyzhik. I asked her how long she had been in the Netherlands; when she told me that she’d been lucky enough to “have a car and some gas in the tank” in the first week of March, 2022, I realized that it wasn’t Russia she had left—it was Ukraine. Her parents were still in Odesa. Between Pyzhik’s busy schedule—TV Rain was just one of her clients—and the frequent blackouts in Odesa resulting from Russian air strikes, it was hard to talk on the phone with them more than once a week. I asked Pyzhik how she felt about working for a Russian television channel, expecting her to say that TV Rain was not like other Russian media, that the people she worked with opposed the war. Instead, she said, “I’m just here to make money. I’ve had to overcome many things in these last months. This is the least of it.”

TV Rain had a presence in Amsterdam because of one person: the Dutch media entrepreneur Derk Sauer, who moved from the Netherlands to the U.S.S.R. in 1989 to launch Moscow , an English-language glossy magazine about the Soviet capital that was modelled on New York. Sauer was a former radical student activist, a self-described Maoist turned war correspondent. Moscow  folded after two years, but his next venture, an English-language newspaper called the Moscow Times , became one of the city’s most popular and reliable publications. In 2005, Sauer sold his company, whose holdings then included the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan  and Playboy , for a hundred and eighty million dollars. Still, he stayed in the country. A few years ago, at the age of sixty-four, he bought back the Moscow Times  and turned it into a digital nonprofit. A Russian-language edition appeared in January of 2022, a month before the paper’s staff had to flee Russia. Sauer moved back to Amsterdam, where he hadn’t lived in thirty-three years.

Before leaving Moscow, Sauer persuaded the Dutch Embassy to issue visas to Russian journalists. About half of the Moscow Times’  twenty-five-person staff joined him in Amsterdam (the rest relocated to Armenia). The paper was cut off from the funding sources that it had relied on in Russia—advertising, subscriptions, events, and private donations—so Sauer proposed building a support network of independent Russian media, beginning with the Moscow Times , TV Rain, and Meduza. “Fund-raising is much easier if you come together,” he told me. The group has been able to secure significant funding from what Sauer called “international foundations.”

A Belgian media company offered to share its office space in Amsterdam. Sauer invited TV Rain to work out of the building, too. He envisioned it as a professional community center of sorts. “These journalists have been moving from one Airbnb to another,” he told me. “It’s so important for them to have a place to communicate with each other, to come up with ideas, and to party with each other.”

TV Rain has a small studio and an adjacent room full of desks. A kitchen, which doubles as the makeup studio, connects to the Moscow Times . When I visited, Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a weekly current-affairs program, was recording his show. I last saw Fishman on March 1, 2022, TV Rain’s final day of regular broadcasting from Moscow. Afterward, Fishman and his partner, the Ukrainian-born journalist Yulia Taratuta, fled Russia with their four-year-old daughter, were denied entry to Georgia, spent a few weeks in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and then several months in Israel before landing in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam studio had recently been outfitted with TV Rain’s signature pink lighting and a new anchor desk. Fishman hadn’t realized that the camera would now see his feet; his black suède shoes looked worn and comfortable but not exactly telegenic.

Fishman originally modelled his show on John Oliver’s: he is funny and knowledgeable, and he used his access to Kremlin insiders to mock Putinism. When the war began, he said, “it was time to stop laughing.” He has since started to doubt his own expertise. “One of the first statements I made on air when it began was ‘This is an unpopular war, and Putin has already lost,’ ” Fishman told me. “But the way the draft went down, the way people have submitted to it and gone to war when their chances of survival are less than fifty per cent—I mean, they are spending their own money on gear so they can be shipped off to be killed! I no longer understand.”

It’s increasingly difficult for Fishman to get anyone in Russia to speak on air—several of his regular contacts have been arrested—but when I was in the studio he was interviewing a Russian human-rights activist still working in the country. The conversation was peculiarly normal. Fishman’s reporting methods haven’t changed in exile, which makes his current feelings of disconnection all the more confusing to him. “In Moscow, I used to work from home,

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