Inside the Amsterdam control room of TV Rain in August, monitors displayed buildings up in flames — a familiar image from the Russia-Ukraine war.

On air, editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko told viewers that another logistics center belonging to Wildberries — Russia’s version of Amazon — had been struck by Ukrainian drones. Strikes like this have reportedly knocked out more than a fifth of the company’s warehouse capacity this summer. (Ukraine says some Wildberries logistics facilities have been used to supply the Russian military, an allegation the company denies.)

That same afternoon, Russian state television also showed burning warehouses, but the story was almost the mirror opposite of TV Rain.

Channel One, Russia’s flagship state-controlled broadcaster, was reporting on warehouses in Ukraine struck by Russian weapons and describing them as military targets. The wider Russian barrage on Kyiv, however, also struck civilian retailers and killed at least 17 people.

Independent journalism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia was never easy. Reporters have long faced censorship, surveillance, jail time and even suspicious deaths during his tenure in the Kremlin. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the crackdown has only intensified — forcing whole news outlets into exile. More than 1,500 Russian journalists have fled abroad, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Dzyadko and several other members of TV Rain left the country soon after the start of the war, eventually setting up operations in Amsterdam.

“Our goal now is somehow different because we are not only informing our audience about what is happening, we are trying to change the situation,” Dzyadko said, sitting in his newsroom’s new Dutch offices. “We are trying to put this war to an end. It doesn’t mean that we have a lot of other instruments in [comparison] to what we used to have, but still we are trying to do it.”

Since it reorganized abroad, Russian authorities have designated TV Rain an “undesirable organization,” effectively banning its activities inside the country and exposing people who cooperate with it — including interviewees or would-be donors — to the risk of prosecution.

“Normal journalism in Russia has been criminalized by the Russian government after the beginning of the invasion,” Dzyadko said.

Some staff members in TV Rain’s Amsterdam studio work anonymously to protect family and friends still living in Russia from possible reprisals. As one of the show’s on-air faces, Dzyadko doesn’t have that option. 

In 2025, he was placed on a government list of “terrorists and extremists.” In May 2026, a Russian court sentenced him in absentia to eight years in prison under “foreign agent” and wartime censorship laws. The criminal case built against Dzyadko alleged that he promoted “false information about violent actions by Russian military personnel,” including a social media post about the massacre of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war by Russian forces in the early days of the invasion. One post linked to a New York Times documentary about the Bucha massacre.

Exile creates a paradox for these journalists: Outside Russia, they can report without the same threat of arrest or censorship. But distance also makes the fundamental work of journalism — talking to people, observing daily life and verifying what is happening — much harder.

“We can’t just walk outside and get a sense for what the public mood is,” said Samantha Berkhead, editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times, another independent Russian news outlet now based in the Netherlands and also designated “undesirable” by Russian authorities.

Instead, Berkhead said, her team must “constantly work extra hard” to find sources still inside Russia while protecting them from repercussions.

“It’s a crime to even speak to us now,” she said.

As an English-language newsroom covering Russia, The Moscow Times also has the unique challenge of competing for newsreaders’ attention alongside large international outlets like the BBC, which still has a correspondent in the country. Berkhead argued that The Moscow Times is often able to cover topics international news organizations sometimes overlook.

Berkhead pointed to the outlet’s extensive reporting on non-Slavic ethnic minorities across the Russian Federation, highlighting mass protests in some ethnic republics and the disproportionately high casualty rates among soldiers from these regions compared to ethnic Russian casualties. With reporters unable to travel freely through Russia, Berkhead said her bilingual newsroom increasingly combines traditional fact-checking with open-source intelligence, also known as OSINT.

“We try to get at least three human sources,” she said. “Also OSINT — we’ve become like OSINT warriors in terms of verifying footage,” referring to the abbreviation for open-source intelligence.

Reaching readers and viewers inside Russia presents another hurdle. The Kremlin has blocked or restricted many of the online platforms Russians use to access news, including YouTube, WhatsApp and, increasingly, Telegram.

Mikhail Fishman, a TV Rain journalist who hosts programs on YouTube, said the widespread adoption of virtual private networks, or VPNs, has helped independent media maintain an audience inside the country.

“The use of VPNs has expanded so dramatically,” Fishman said. “That’s why we’re still accessible throughout Russia and we have our audience there.”

VPNs can disguise a user’s physical location. While it helps make TV Rain accessible to its Russian audience, the technology also makes it difficult for the newsroom to determine how many of its viewers are actually inside Russia.

A recent study by the Center for European Policy Analysis estimated that independent Russian outlets collectively reach as many as 8 million regular users inside the country each month. Though this is a relatively small fraction of Russia’s population of more than 140 million people, some impacts of reporting are more difficult to quantify. 

Russian officials and government-funded media are also watching, said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. That means reporting from exile can sometimes force issues into the broader national conversation.

“For example, if the independent press are going to report on casualties, it’s then sort of difficult for the government and government-friendly media to pretend that those casualties aren’t happening,” Greene said. “They can spin it, they can quibble about the exact numbers, but it does affect the discourse.”

That dynamic was visible after Russia’s latest parliamentary elections — the first since the start of the war. State media emphasized that President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party had won 58% of the vote, with one saying “The West had failed” at interfering in the Russian democratic process. On the other hand, analysts and outside experts questioned the integrity of the results. TV Rain also took a far more skeptical approach.

In a segment that aired after the election, Dzyadko reported that “without the falsification” of results in the election, Putin’s party might have only received 34% of the vote, citing independent analysis.

His news hour continued on to other topics – the imprisonment of a Russian anti-war political prisoner and another Ukrainian strike against a Russian oil refinery. 

Then he turned to some international news: In the United States, President Donald Trump accused American news outlets CNN, Politico and MS NOW of “Fake News” and barred them from accessing the White House, Dzyadko explained.

The Trump administration subsequently launched “TV Trump” as an alternative. Some have criticized the platform as “state-run media.”

For a journalist whose own government has banned his newsroom, the story carried particular resonance for Dzyadko.

“I think it’s very important not to think that it is something small,” Dzyadko said in a follow-up voice message. “It is a big and bad sign for US society.”

Dzyadko said the episode in the US reminded him of the early years of Putin’s presidency, when the Kremlin began to take control of television broadcasters and apply pressure to independent news media.

“One of his first [moves] was his campaign against free press in Russia, because [Putin] perfectly understands that a person who controls the media gets the power in his hands,” Dzyadko said. “And since Donald Trump wants to act like Vladimir Putin, he tries to do the same.”

The “good news” for the US, he said, is that the country still has independent courts capable of intervening and countering executive overreach. And, indeed, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House restrictions recently. 

And unlike TV Rain forced to operate outside Russia, Dzyadko said, there are plenty of independent American news outlets still able to speak truth to power from inside the country.