Media in Russia: "I couldn't have imagined it"

The mail from the censorship authority arrived at one in the morning: A Russian reporter reported on how the editorial staff of “Mediazona” wants to continue to provide information about the war in Ukraine.

On Sunday night, the Russian media supervisory authority Roskomnadzor blocked other online media that reported critically about the attack on Ukraine.

The Internet newspaper “Mediazona”, which has specialized in the Russian police and judicial system since it was founded in 2013, also received news of the censorship order.

We spoke to one of their editorial staff about how to proceed.

His name must remain anonymous.

The beginning of the war and censorship surprised him in the Armenian capital Yerevan, where he was staying to get the second Biontech vaccination for a planned stay in the EU.

How are you?

The night the war broke out, I was lying in bed with a fever after being vaccinated, a surreal moment.

I just wanted to stay in Yerevan for a few days to recover from the vaccination and then return to Moscow.

This plan was of course invalidated with the news of the war.

I had my passport and other documents with me, so I decided to stay.

A lot of Russians are stranded in Yerevan at the moment because there are no direct flights from Russia to Georgia - currently the most popular destination for many who want to leave Russia.

The cafes are packed with people discussing itineraries and escape plans.

Everyone has left the country in a great hurry and is now trying to find out whether and how they can come to Tbilisi or whether it is better to stay for the time being.

The housing market collapsed.

Luckily I have hosts who allowed me to extend my stay.

Anyone who arrived yesterday or today has great difficulty finding a place to stay.

The Russian media supervisory authority Roskomnadzor blocked access to your newspaper "Mediazona" on Sunday night, but the website is still online.

What's next?

We have decided to continue our work.

The bans hit everyone in the independent media space, from local publications covering protests in Novosibirsk or Krasnoyarsk to our nationwide, “federal” publication platforms.

There are no longer any differences.

As of last night, about two dozen publications had been blocked for reporting on the war;

we then received an email from Roskomnadzor at 1 a.m. with a request to remove illegal content from our "Mediazona" homepage - "deliberately false, socially significant information that poses a threat of disruption to public order, especially information and materials on the alleged attack by Russia on the territory of Ukraine”.

Russian prosecutors and Roskomnadzor are trying to suppress the use of the term "war".

The preferred term is "special operation".

Everyone understands that this is a fiction to downplay the scale of events.

Whatever you call it, it's war.

And we can't help but call it that.

We have an overview of the daily events on our website, with all the daily news, and there we talk about "war day one", "war day two" and so on.

We want to continue our work.

We are banned in Russia, regular users of mobile networks and stable providers cannot access our website.

But many of our readers can handle VPN and other technologies that can bypass the blocks.

Roskomnadzor has prepared for this and is making efforts to also block VPNs, proxies and services like Cloudflare.

We do not know how successful this effort is.

Until recently, we didn't see any problems accessing blocked websites like "Meduza" and others.

For now, we can only hope that people will subscribe to our social media accounts and use VPNs.

Also, we have just developed an app that we are making available through app stores.

We hope to open and keep open as many avenues of access for our content as possible.