NEWS IN EXILE

How Russian journalists are covering the war in Ukraine.

- MASHA GESSEN

On December 1st, TV Rain, an independent Russian television station that had been banned from Russian cable and satellite channels, was in its fifth month of broadcasting from Riga, the capital of Latvia. Most of its journalists had fled Moscow during the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dispersing to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, and elsewhere, only to discover in exile that, to much of the world, they represented a country waging genocidal war. Banks wouldn’t accept them as clients, landlords wouldn’t rent to them, and residents in Tbilisi and other cities painted “Russians go home” on street corners. Early on, two Baltic states were exceptions: Lithuania, which had long served as a base for Russia’s political opposition, and Latvia. Last March, the country’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, tweeted, “As #Russia closes independent media and introduces complete censorship, I reiterate Latvia’s readiness to host persecuted Russian journalists and help them in any way we can.”