Mediazona is 12. We would not have made it to this day without you

Our editor-in-chief, Sergey Smirnov, is known for his catchphrase: “It will get worse”. Unfortunately, he has always been right. Over the years, things have taken a turn for the worse many times—both for the people we report on and for ourselves.

When Mediazona was founded 12 years ago, Russia was already jailing people for political reasons and violently dispersing protests. New repressive laws have constantly been passed ever since. Then came the invasion of Ukraine—and a massive wave of criminal cases against those who refused to support this criminal war.

As the number of political prisoners grew, reporting on the reality inside Russia became increasingly dangerous. We were labelled a “foreign agent” (twice, in fact, to add grotesque to injury), our website was blocked, several of our journalists faced criminal charges, and our editorial team was ultimately forced into exile simply to continue working.

We have weathered multiple crises—surviving them all thanks to you:

• In February 2021, when Smirnov was arrested in front of his son and sent to a detention centre, our readers’ support helped us pull together and work twice as hard;

• That fall, when we were first branded “foreign agents”, our readers were not intimidated and did not cancel the donations en masse;

• When the invasion began, we knew the world needed to see what was truly happening inside Russia. We launched our English edition, and you joined us, ensuring our reporting reached a global audience;

• When the Russian state blocked us at every turn, you kept reading, sharing, and amplifying our work across borders. And when our Russian readers were cut off from donating, you stepped up;

• In the spring of 2025, when we found ourselves on the brink of survival, an incredible wave of global support helped us gather the 5,000 donors needed to keep our newsroom alive.

We kept working just as we always have. We cut costs, found ways to bypass censorship, and even temporarily suspended the salaries of our senior editors. But without our international readers, we would never have survived the latest round of “it got worse”.

Over these years, we have mastered a specific skill: not banking on tomorrow being easier, but continuing to fight in the circumstances we find ourselves in. We want to remain realists: it will get worse, but with your help, we will persevere, again.

Recently, the Russian state completely severed our ability to receive donations from within the country, causing us to lose 1,500 domestic subscribers overnight. Over the summer, we managed to gather just over 200 new subscribers.

Our goal now is to fill this gap with support from abroad. Because we can no longer rely on funding from our Russian readers, we need nearly 1,300 new international subscribers to secure our future.

These donations are vital. They are the only way we can keep paying our journalists and editors—including those bravely working from inside Russia. They fund the our work in English and other languages, our complex data-driven investigations, and everything that makes Mediazona what it is today.

If you value our reporting and are in a position to support independent journalism, please become a subscriber today. And please share our work with your friends and colleagues.

Thank you for standing with us since 2022. Let us wish each other the continued strength to face whatever comes next.

It will get worse, but that does not mean we won’t get through it together.