Russian media-in-exile faces existential crises: funding cuts, faltering audiences, declining morale

Maksim Litavrin lives in Riga now, but, behind his eyes, he is far away. In 2022, Litavrin, alongside dozens of fellow reporters, left home and became a Russian journalist-in-exile to escape an environment growing increasingly hostile to independent media.

“Our minds are still in Russia,” he said.

Litavrin had worked for four years for the publication Mediazona, a Russian non-governmental media organization founded in 2014 by members of the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot, when Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In response to Mediazona’s initial coverage of the conflict, the federal agency Roskomnadzor blocked its website and demanded the organization be shut down. Mediazona, like many others, decided to move their operations abroad instead. Within a few weeks Litavrin had packed his belongings and, along with his wife and dog Teo, moved to Latvia via Georgia, a common stopping point for many Russians fleeing the country due to visa-free entry for Russian citizens.

Now in his eighth year, Litavrin has spent half of his tenure with Mediazona abroad. He is working for a publication with half the paying subscribers it once had and struggling to settle himself in a place that is not his home.

In 2022, hundreds of journalists, including entire newsrooms, reluctantly left Russia. The scale of the exodus according to the political analyst and former Russian journalist, Maria Lipman, was unprecedented, even during the Soviet era. Many of these non-governmental media organizations, like Mediazona, came to settle in Latvia.

Lipman said she avoids referring to these organizations as independent because she doubts if truly independent media exists anywhere. She instead prefers the term non-governmental, meaning unaffiliated with the Russian government.

In absentia, the Russian government regularly bars more media organizations and journalists from marketing, blocks them online, and labels them “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations”. Anyone who associates with those carrying these labels risks fines and threats of imprisonment.

Four years into the war, Russian journalists-in-exile find the niche they once occupied squeezed out. Old revenue streams have dried up, their audience in Russia is collapsing, and morale among the journalists-in-exile is at a low point.

Revenue loss

Meduza has been one of the most significant and influential publications reporting on Russia. This group was founded in Latvia in 2014 by Russian journalists who left their publication in Russia for greater press freedom abroad. But even this media stronghold has found itself in a war of attrition.

In April 2021, Meduza was labelled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, which, according to Kate Levina, Meduza’s back-office head, cost the organization around 90 per cent of all its advertising revenue overnight. The Russian government revoked Meduza’s right to advertise, erasing their business model.

Until 2025, the US government provided roughly 15 per cent of Meduza’s annual budget. According to Levina, following the cuts to USAID by President Donald Trump last February 2025, Meduza, still one of the most robust pillars of non-governmental Russian media, fell into financial troubles.

“Thanks to Trump, we lost a lot of our finances,” Levina said. “We were forced to fire some people. We were forced to decrease all the salaries, basically for everyone except for our cleaning lady.”

Radio Free Europe is not a non-governmental media outlet. In fact, it is a US government-funded media organization that has been providing coverage to Eastern Europe and the Middle East since the height of the Cold War. However, like other media organizations who had to leave Russia when the war started, Radio Free Europe had teetered on a similar cliff since last March. The United States Agency for Global Media notified the news outlet that its grant had been cancelled around this time.

“We saw this as unconstitutional and we went to court,” said Aleksejs Busarovs, the head of Radio Free Europe’s Riga office. “We won that case. We managed to restore our funding last year.”

However, on February 3rd, the Trump administration passed a new bill which effectively cut Radio Free Europe’s funding by 21 per cent, bringing the organization’s annual budget to 112.5 million US dollars, according to Busarovs. This pales in comparison to Russia’s current propaganda budget, which is 146.3 billion rubles for 2026 – roughly 1.8 billion dollars.

Collapse of audience

For Meduza, Mediazona and Radio Free Europe, their readership within Russia has declined dramatically since the beginning of the war. According to Litavrin, Mediazona has lost half of its subscribers since the start of the war and now has only 5,000. However, he also said that Mediazona’s audience increased during the 2023 attempted coup, in which Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and leader of the private mercenary group Wagner, turned on Putin and tried, unsuccessfully, to march his army to Moscow.

Busarovs also said that Radio Free Europe’s readership noticeably spikes during emergency situations.

“It means that when people in Russia need trustworthy information, they go to us,” Busarovs said. “They know how to reach us. But due to some reasons, they prefer not to do it on a regular basis.”

Ivan Dmitrievich Tupitsin, 31, lives in Novosibirsk, Russia and does not connect with these kinds of publications. He said the content these media outlets produce often misrepresents the reality he sees around him every day.

“I could read Meduza about ten years ago,” he said. “However, their rhetoric changed dramatically after the war began, so now I don't know anyone for whom Meduza would be a reliable source of information.”

Others feel alienated or completely abandoned by these media outlets-in-exile. Elena Olegovna Bezuglova, 25, from Moscow said sometimes these articles outright insult ordinary Russians.

“Sometimes I read articles that made me feel like someone had dumped a bucket of slop on me,” Bezuglova said. “These media outlets don't usually communicate the need to improve Russia (or how to do it) but rather propose tearing everything down and building it anew.”

Litavrin conceded that a palpable tension exists between the exiles and those remaining in Russia. Sometimes, he said, the media-in-exile may be putting undue blame on those who stayed.

Additionally, after hearing of Meduza’s financial issues following Trump’s cuts to USAID, Bezuglova said she now feels Meduza is sponsored by foreign governments pushing their own interests.

Levina defended Meduza’s independence and said that more than 90 per cent of Meduza’s funding pays to support the organization and does not fund specific coverage.

Declining morale

Litavrin said he sometimes looks through Google Street View at the streets and alleys of his hometown Novosibirsk or Moscow, where his career at Mediazona got started. He wallows in grief over memories of a time and a place he cannot go back to.

The saddest part for him, he said, was when his wife went back to Moscow for two weeks in 2023. She returned to Riga to confirm his fears. It is not the same place they left. She said the people were different, they seemed scared, they spoke in whispers. She said she could feel the presence of an “elephant in the room”.

“I don’t miss the city, but I miss that period in my life,” Litavrin said. “But to go back there, I would need a time machine.”

 

 

According to Lipman, in Latvia, Russian journalists are “on an island”, part of the social environment, but isolated from the wider media community. Litavrin said he feels the same.

Litavrin has permanent residency in Latvia, but he said other Russian journalists-in-exile have not yet achieved that.

Many Russian journalists applied for the Latvian long-stay visa, a short-term immigration solution, instead of asylum, which would bar them from the possibility of returning home. This was reported by Sabine Sile, the founder of Media Hub Riga, a non-governmental nonprofit organization working to support independent journalists and their families.

Sile said many are using this visa as a long-term solution, reapplying year after year and it is growing unsustainable as these short-term visas were not designed for long-term immigration and do not allow one to work.

The Latvian government, earlier this year, restricted the issuance of long-stay visas for Russian nationals, except in certain exempt situations. This was done in order to “reduce threat to public order and internal security”.

Nadezhda Yurova, who works for Novaya Gazeta Europe in Riga, is another journalist-in-exile who needed to pick up her life and move when her organization left Russia in 2022.

“That was the hardest,” she said. “To leave without the possibility of coming back. And all my family is still there.”

 

 

Yurova said she is closest with her grandmother, who lived in the same building as her. She grew up in Moscow’s Basmanny district and said that four generations of her family have lived there.

“Every street, every house, is saturated with my family’s history,” she said.

Her father is disabled, but she said she managed to meet her mum and grandmother in Georgia once. Unfortunately, the expensive flights and visas make consistently seeing her family difficult.

For Litavrin and Yurova, without their sense of home, family and belonging, planning more than a year out is impossible.

Future of Russian journalism

Russian journalists-in-exile wonder what will happen to non-governmental Russian journalism in the future. Lipman said she believes that the audience for Russian media abroad today is split, creating another challenge for these journalists.

“There's a large enough audience of immigrant Russians who are also consumers of this media,” she said. “But when your audience is split between those who find themselves in different countries of the world trying to start a new life, and those who stayed in Russia, which has become more and more repressive on a daily basis, how do you shape your coverage?”

R. Taylor Robinson is an independent journalist pursuing a Master of Science in Journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School. He focuses on geopolitical and investigative reporting through the lens of the people living through it.