“Anything else in life will seem less meaningful.”: Journalism in exile
In 2025, thousands of journalists are working in exile due to political and judicial persecution by authoritarian regimes in their home countries, and fear for the safety of themselves and their families. The BBC alone now employs 310 journalists in exile. Many of them are from China, Myanmar, Cuba, Ethiopia, Ukraine and Russia.
Currently, Russia is the largest exporter of journalists, with 1500 now unable to work at home. For many years, these journalists wrote for various independent Russian media outlets, presenting alternative points of view. But with the growing repression and attacks on freedom of press, which intensified further after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they were forced to leave and seek asylum in other countries.
Prominent Russian journalists like Ilya Barabanov, Kirill Martinov, Masha Gessen and Mikhail Zygar, have been forced to build lives and careers elsewhere. In some cases, entire media platforms shifted abroad under threat of prosecution. Dozhd (TV Rain), once the largest independent news channel in Russia, which interviewed figures like Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and other opposition leaders, covered protests, and talked about corruption and police violence. It now broadcasts from the Netherlands.
Olga Churakova, a former investigative journalist for Proekt Media, an independent Russian media outlet, emigrated in 2022. She says working in Russia is hard, but it is not easy to go into exile either.
“In Russia you are under constant pressure from the authorities,” she says. “You face the constant impossibility of doing your job calmly, the risk of criminalisation, the risk of persecution. In emigration you face domestic problems: the impossibility to live a normal life in peace, because you have no chance to fail, not to work, to roll everything back, to go back to your mum’s dacha”