2026-06-27 04:51:05
Even before tensions with the US reached a fever pitch, European Union officials have wanted to independently develop and control their digital infrastructure and tech, without relying on the US or China. This desire reflects concerns over privacy, competitiveness, nationalism, and Europe’s economic decline. But there are four major problems that make tech sovereignty difficult to achieve.
Fragmented markets and governance create difficult political obstacles to achieving tech sovereignty. To address this, some EU policymakers and analysts propose a “Delaware model,” or 28th regime, to make it easier for European tech startups to scale in Europe.
But Delaware is embedded in a strong Federal system that is seen as legitimate by citizens and companies. This gives Delaware’s rulings a unifying national influence. The other 49 states accept Delaware’s court rulings. A single ruling by the Delaware Court of Chancery sets corporate governance rules for much of the US economy. Under the EU’s new proposal, companies would still be required to deal with national courts.
European attitudes towards risk are another obstacle. European culture is more risk-averse than either China or the US, perhaps reflecting the continent’s unhappy 20th-century history with the World Wars and the Cold War. Europeans regulate technology to mitigate conflict, prevent dictatorship, limit surveillance, or even ensure survival — European special interest groups for climate, for example, are much more influential, and their energy policies have unnecessarily harmed EU competitiveness. While many countries are increasingly risk-averse, the EU provides an institutional framework to manage risk that has noticeably slowed tech innovation
Europe’s chances for tech sovereignty have also been significantly damaged by Brexit. The UK is a global leader in innovation and has a strong, globally connected financial system that other European countries cannot match. While UK-EU cooperation has been ongoing, UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle recently called for a new tech deal between the two parties.
Europe has underinvested in technology for decades and is now far behind both China and the US. Even starting with adequate funds — and adequate funding would require much more than what the EU and its member states have committed so far — it will take many years for Europe to build technological sovereignty and independence. It took China thirty years, under a much more ruthless and unconstrained government.
Europe is unwilling to make the social spending cuts or increase taxes to remedy the shortfall in tech investment. French President Emmanuel Macron’s unhappy 2023 experience with pension reform served as a lesson for other EU nations. Europe was able to support this level of social spending when the US subsidized its defense. That is no longer the case. It is difficult for any democracy to cut social spending, and this will make it harder for the EU to catch up.
Each problem poses difficult political issues that require compromises and concessions on sovereignty and spending that European nations are unlikely to make. These problems are political and cultural. They slow, if not prevent, tech sovereignty.
Tech sovereignty for Europe is not completely out of the question, but it is not an immediately achievable goal — nor is it cheap. Counterintuitively, a transatlantic tech partnership may be the best approach to build EU tech independence. Europe has a strong research base, a structured government, a common currency, and a supply of innovators. Europe can unite and act when necessary — the Euro is a testament to that. Europe can also take a more assertive role in rebuilding the transatlantic relationship, but only if its leaders make hard decisions on spending, risk, and sovereignty.
Given Europe’s strengths, the US would also benefit from a closer tech partnership. A weak EU tech sector weakens democracies’ strategic advantage, but a strong EU benefits the US more than it does China or Russia. Washington does not need Brussels as much as Brussels needs Washington, but both would be stronger as partners.
James Lewis is a Distinguished Fellow at CEPA’s Tech Policy program.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
The post EU Tech Sovereignty is Wishful Thinking appeared first on CEPA.
2026-06-27 04:25:11
Climate policies have become targets in election campaigns. Governments are revisiting net-zero emissions commitments. Populist parties frame wind, solar, and hydro as symbols of elite overreach, industrial decline, or rising household costs.
Yet beneath the political noise, something unexpected is happening: renewables are booming.
Environmentalists long assumed the energy transition would rise or fall with political support. Today, the opposite appears closer to the truth. Political support is weakening across much of the West. The transition is accelerating anyway. Renewables are no longer advancing primarily because governments want them to. They are advancing because economics and energy security support them.
The fallout from the recent conflict in the Gulf sent oil prices soaring and reignited concerns over the vulnerability of global energy supply chains. Fears of disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz once again highlighted how dependent modern economies remain on fuel imports and maritime chokepoints.
Energy security returned to the center of political debate — and many policymakers now view renewable generation less as a climate tool than as insurance against geopolitical instability. The latest Middle East tensions reinforced a lesson Europe first learned in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine: energy dependence remains a strategic vulnerability regardless of whether the source of disruption lies in Moscow or Tehran.
Europe’s fundamental problem is fossil fuel dependence, argues Jan Rosenow of Oxford University. Every major energy shock of the past several decades has ultimately originated in hydrocarbons. The correct response is not merely to diversify suppliers but to reduce exposure to fossil fuels through electrification, efficiency improvements, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and cleaner industrial processes.
Europe entered the decade expecting climate policy to be the main driver of renewable deployment. Instead, it has become a national security imperative. Governments that once discussed renewables through the language of emissions have begun discussing them through the language of resilience, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy.
The results are striking. In 2024, renewables generated 47% of EU electricity, up from 34% only five years earlier. Wind and solar alone supplied nearly 30% of electricity generation. By 2025, wind and solar overtook fossil fuels in Europe’s power mix for the first time. Solar generation has increased by more than 20% annually for four consecutive years.
The renewables boom is unfolding amid growing political resistance. Across Europe, debates over net-zero targets and the cost of decarbonization have become contentious. Yet deployment continues because many governments have reached a simple conclusion: domestically produced electricity is strategically preferable to imported fuels.
A similar dynamic is at play in the US, where Republicans increasingly believe the US should prioritize fossil fuel energy sources. Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has rolled back Biden-era incentives and tax breaks for clean energy and struck massive deals to pay billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to energy developers to voluntarily abandon and cancel their offshore wind leases.
Yet American solar, wind, and battery investments have remained remarkably resilient. In 2025, wind and solar generated a record 17% of US electricity. Utility-scale solar generation grew by 34% in a single year. Renewable sources supplied more than a quarter of total American electricity generation, while solar accounted for roughly half of all new generating capacity additions.
Some of the fastest renewable expansion is occurring not in traditionally progressive states, but in Texas and across the American South. Although local politicians may oppose climate mandates, they rarely oppose investment, jobs, tax revenue, and reliable electricity.
Renewables are increasingly economical. For much of the past two decades, renewable energy was often portrayed as a premium product requiring subsidies and public support. Today, solar modules and wind farms have become dramatically cheaper. Battery costs are falling. Wind and solar now produce electricity much cheaper than gas or coal-fired plants.
Still, a green transition is not guaranteed. Grid infrastructure remains inadequate across much of Europe and North America. Permitting procedures remain slow. Supply chains remain concentrated in China and fears about how to cope with weak wind or breaks in sunshine remain.
Yet the broad trajectory appears difficult to reverse. The International Energy Agency projects that renewable power capacity additions between 2025 and 2030 will reach 4,600 gigawatts globally, equivalent to the combined power capacity of China, the European Union, and Japan today.
Utilities need electricity. Industries need predictability. Governments need energy security. Consumers need lower costs. Increasingly, renewables represent the best way to satisfy these crucial needs.
Maciej Bukowski is the Head of Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw, and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
The post The Wind and Solar Surprise: Renewables Keep Winning appeared first on CEPA.
2026-06-26 23:44:54
While Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won almost 50% of the vote on June 7, and his Civil Contract party secured another parliamentary majority, a political movement built around Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, won 23% and became the largest opposition force in the country.
And that outcome may prove much more consequential than the raw numbers suggest.
That’s because it’s a familiar pattern in the South Caucasus. Wealthy businessmen with deep ties to Russia periodically reinvent themselves as political leaders during moments of crisis and transition.
Bidzina Ivanishvili in Georgia, and Ruben Vardanyan in Nagorno-Karabakh, are among the most prominent examples. Karapetyan is just the latest to follow that path.
Karapetyan made his money after moving to Russia in the late 1990s. After taking over a logistics and supply company that counted Gazprom among its main clients, he built Tashir Group into one of Russia’s largest conglomerates, with interests spanning commercial real estate, construction, energy and retail.
Karapetyan entered politics a year before the election. Within six months, he had launched Strong Armenia, which went on to become the country’s largest opposition force. The speed of both his rise and Strong Armenia’s emergence is striking. So are the circumstances.
He spent much of the campaign in detention or under house arrest on charges of calling for the overthrow of the government. He rarely appeared in public, yet his image was everywhere — on billboards, on social media, and across Armenia’s political debate. Campaign rallies were led by his nephew Narek Karapetyan.
Strong Armenia’s showing does not threaten Pashinyan’s hold on power, but it has changed the dynamics.
Karapetyan is more than just a businessman entering politics, he is now a central figure in the political debate. And his rise is not just about personal popularity, it reflects deeper disagreements about the country’s future direction.
Pashinyan won re-election with a message of peace, stability, and economic development, and was able to show new roads, schools, kindergartens, and infrastructure projects as visible symbols of that promise.
Yet not all Armenians were convinced. And the shadow of Armenia’s military defeat to its neighbor Azerbaijan after a long and bloody war hangs over the country.
Many remain skeptical about the current peace process, while others are uneasy about the government’s foreign policy course and its push for closer ties with Europe. For some, the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and the expulsion of 100,000 Armenians is an open wound, while others are more concerned that Armenia is giving up too much in exchange for promises of stability.
Karapetyan did not create those doubts, but he gave them a political vehicle.
That’s significant because, in the past, political forces advocating closer ties with Russia have struggled to refresh their image. Their leaders remained the same, their messages largely unchanged. Karapetyan offered a new face.
And that is where Moscow enters the story.
Investigations and reports have described Russian efforts to cultivate political alternatives to Pashinyan, and Karapetyan’s emergence fits neatly into that pattern.
He combines substantial financial resources, public visibility, ties to influential conservative and religious circles, and decades of experience operating in Russia’s political and economic system. His support for the Armenian Apostolic Church during its confrontation with Pashinyan strengthened those ties at a moment when the Church remained one of the country’s most trusted institutions.
And that combination matters because it means Karapetyan does not need to look like a traditional party leader to be politically useful. His value lies in the network around him: money, business interests, institutional allies, and a public profile large enough to unite voters who are uneasy with the country’s course but tired of the old opposition.
For Moscow, that makes him valuable even without an election victory. Influence does not always require winning power, sometimes it‘s about building a durable and effective political instrument.
Whether one views Karapetyan as a Kremlin project, or simply a politician whose interests happen to align with Moscow, is less important than the political reality facing Armenia. Nearly a quarter of voters backed Karapetyan, with his close ties to Russia and a more skeptical view of Armenia’s current European trajectory.
That should not necessarily be read as Armenians turning back to Moscow, or abandoning Brussels, because Armenian politics rarely fits such clean categories.
Even Pashinyan, with his fresh mandate, is not looking for a rupture with Russia, and many voters who question his course are not simply pro-Kremlin.
Moscow does, however, now have a stronger channel through which to influence Armenian politics, and Karapetyan has emerged as someone around whom the Kremlin can build its next strategy.
For Pashinyan, that creates a distinct challenge.
No government wants a powerful opposition movement closely associated with a foreign power, and the temptation to weaken it through investigations, court, or administrative pressure is obvious. Pashinyan himself signaled as much after the election, describing the opposition as a “three-headed party of war” and saying its leaders should face criminal liability and that the “criminal-oligarchic system” must be eradicated from Armenia.
How he responds may prove to be just as important as the election result itself.
Agnieszka Filipiak is a Polish journalist and senior editor specializing in the South Caucasus, Russian influence, and democratic resilience. She is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Women Polska, author of several publications on the region, including the College of Eastern Europe’s report ‘At the Crossroads of Asia and Europe: Poland’s Foreign Policy towards the South Caucasus,’ and creator of the Filipiak Insights newsletter.
The post Armenia’s New Pro-Russian Opposition Leader appeared first on CEPA.
2026-06-26 22:59:50
Armenia’s prime minister won re-election on June 7 in spite of the clergy, Moscow, and history. He proved that with proper leadership, hard work, and the courage to look forward rather than back, leaders can take their people along even the hardest roads.
Pashinyan showed that even a small, landlocked nation in a difficult neighborhood can refuse to act as a pawn in someone else’s game, and start building its own place in the world through open borders, better transport and data connections, and integration into global trade corridors.
By working toward a settlement with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and opening the door to normalization with Turkey, Pashinyan has created a chance that this fractured corner of the world could function as a cooperative region, rather than a collection of frozen conflicts and closed borders.
Armenia is not the only small country in the neighborhood where there was reason for hope. For years, Georgia championed a better neighborhood and became a beacon for post-Soviet transformation, consistent and deliberate in its European, democratic choice, even under the most relentless pressure from Moscow.
Georgia was never confused about where it belonged, and it built the infrastructure to go with its choice. These included the BTC and TANAP energy pipelines, the BTK railway running from Azerbaijan to Turkey, road and energy connections, and trade corridors. None was an accident of geography. They were the product of deliberate political choices, of trust built over years, of enormous Western investment in Georgia.
These foundations have now been undermined by the Georgian Dream government, which won power in 2012 and has eroded many of the democratic and diplomatic gains of the previous years in order to hold onto it.
The US push for a settlement with Azerbaijan (and the associated TRIPP road corridor), however promising in the wake of Armenia’s vote, faces a structural problem precisely because Georgia is now nearly absent from the picture. That is a gap no serious strategy can afford to ignore, and a region defined by its interconnections cannot be stabilized by a deal that accounts for only part of it.
The question is whether Washington recognizes that the South Caucasus is a puzzle and that Georgia is a key piece. If it does, Washington could exercise considerable leverage in Tbilisi, certainly more than anyone else. Applied with consistency and purpose, that could bring Georgia back to a path it never should have left.
Georgia did not lose its potential; it lost its way politically. Washington helped build Georgia’s path to democracy and cooperation, and can help rebuild it now.
Some will argue there are ways to bypass Georgia (Armenia also borders both Turkey and Azerbaijan, for example). But these come at far greater cost, in time, in money, and in political capital. The more rational course is to treat Georgia as a central player on which a functional regional architecture depends.
The Georgian Dream government is acutely aware of this calculus and is playing its own hand accordingly. It has been deepening engagement with China through high-level meetings, declarations on deep and comprehensive strategic cooperation, and a deliberate presentation of alternatives. By publicly elevating its partnership with Beijing, Tbilisi also appears intent on signaling to Washington that it has other strategic options, using its ties with China as leverage to challenge US influence and demonstrate that American disengagement will not leave Georgia without powerful partners.
But Tbilisi knows the path back to stability runs through Washington, and the conditions for that are well understood: democratic governance, the primacy of the rule of law, and a return to the Euro-Atlantic path that Georgian Dream has been turning away from.
Washington understands this, too, and it is the only player with the tools to act. The European Union (EU) has influence but has already been rebuffed on accession and lacks the hard tools to compel action. Meanwhile, Russia’s interest is in Georgian instability, not in making Georgia a stable and sovereign state.
Iran has its own regional calculations, but no credible offer to make to a country whose society is genuinely European. China can offer investment and political flattery, but not the security or the future that Georgians voted for.
It is Washington, through bilateral security relationships, financial institutions, and the backing of Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic orientation, that holds the cards.
Targeted pressure on individuals responsible for democratic backsliding, conditionality to security cooperation, and direct diplomatic engagement are instruments that have been used effectively elsewhere. What has been missing is the sustained will to deploy them in Georgia.
Washington wants a South Caucasus deal that works, not one that looks good on paper but falls apart when it comes into contact with reality. Pressing for democratic stability in Georgia is not a detour; it is the most direct path.
The South Caucasus has seen peace initiatives before. They have come with summits and frameworks and cautious optimism, and they have unraveled. The region has lived through cycles of ceasefire and conflict, of Western engagement followed by fatigue and retreat, of progress that looked durable until it was not.
But this moment is different. For the first time, there is a leader in the region who has staked everything on a genuine transformation and won a democratic mandate for it. Notably, this came with significant support from the US, despite Russia’s aid for the opposition.
Acting in Tbilisi and winning in the South Caucasus are not choices between two separate objectives; they are the same thing.
Tinatin Khidasheli heads Civic-IDEA, a think-tank fighting the Soviet legacy in Georgia, confronting Russian propaganda, and advocating for a sound defense and security policy. Tinatin is the author of the first Georgian-language book on Hybrid Warfare and teaches Hybrid Warfare and Defense Policy in Georgia. Mrs. Khidasheli served as Georgia’s first female Minister of Defense. She is a lawyer by education, holds an LLM in International Law from Tbilisi State University, and an MA in Political Science from the Central European University in Hungary. Mrs. Khidasheli is a Visiting Researcher at the Graduate School of Law, Hitotsubashi University.
The post Washington Can Change the South Caucasus appeared first on CEPA.
2026-06-26 03:03:27
Information control is always a top priority for authoritarian regimes, and Russia is no exception. Since Vladimir Putin’s rise to the presidency, the Kremlin has used every pretext to tighten the screws on independent journalism, including during the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, the hostage crisis at a Moscow theater in 2002, and the subsequent hostage crisis at a school in Beslan in 2004. Any outlets that offered honest reporting consistently suffered reprisals, leading to a gradual dismantling of the space for independent journalism that had emerged in the 1990s.1
Over the past four years, however, Russian independent media have operated under conditions that are dramatically harsher than those of the previous two decades. With the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin imposed wartime censorship and effectively criminalized independent journalism, primarily through the introduction of heavy penalties for spreading “fake information” about the conflict and for the so-called “discreditation” of the Russian armed forces.2 Independent outlets that had endured numerous earlier crackdowns, such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, and TV Rain, were forced to suspend operations within the country.3 Russia’s standing in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index fell from 150th in 2021 to 172nd in 2026, out of 180 countries in total.4
What followed was a massive relocation of independent media, with some 1,500 journalists leaving the country.5 A steady outflow of media professionals from Russia between 2012 and 2022 had already generated functioning models of journalism in exile, including the professional networks, infrastructure, and institutional know-how needed to absorb a much larger exodus.
By 2026, Russian exiled media had evolved into a well-developed ecosystem, producing journalism that matters to millions of people. Their achievement has come against formidable odds, as independent outlets confront an authoritarian machinery that has worked for years to extinguish alternative voices. The media organizations in this community continue to innovate in order to preserve its ethos of independent journalism and the free flow of information.
The present report examines what has happened to Russian independent media projects since the termination of their work in Russia and the start of their operations in exile. It is one of three reports in a series mapping the resilience and continued impact of Russia’s democratic civil society.
The report defines Russian independent media projects as a media ecosystem rather than a sector, as they range from legacy outlets and channels with formal editorial standards to much smaller teams or individuals operating primarily on YouTube and Telegram. The report draws on 32 interviews with media managers and journalists representing 23 different projects, conducted in 2025–26, and 15 interviews with institutional donors supporting their work. We supplemented this information with the analysis of traffic data covering the period 2021–26, which were partially validated with internal data that 11 media projects privately shared with us.
The report traces how independent media have adapted to new operating conditions inside and outside Russia, documents the scale and texture of the impact that they still generate among their audiences in the country, and examines the constraints that have threatened their position, including the 2025 funding crisis associated with the reorientation of US foreign aid.
We argue that Russian independent media projects are not merely beneficiaries of support from democratic countries. They are a strategic asset in the struggle against the Russian dictatorship and its influence abroad. We also argue that in an era of technological breakthroughs in both media innovation and authoritarian censorship and disinformation, these media projects represent a test case for how free voices opposing authoritarianism worldwide can be technologically and institutionally reinforced.
Independent journalists are among the most heavily repressed segments of Russian society, second only to opposition politicians.6 The reason is structural. Independent reporting exposes abuse of power, corruption, injustice, and the arbitrariness of policymaking, raising the political costs of authoritarian misrule. This makes an independent journalist the autocrat’s natural adversary.7 Over the last 25 years, the Kremlin has steadily increased the risks associated with the profession by expanding its repertoire of repressive instruments. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the independent media have suffered disproportionately from the broader crackdown on dissent.
Data from OVD-Info and the Mass Media Defence Centre (see Figure 1) show that journalists and media figures have been the most common targets of “foreign agent” designations, administrative cases brought under discriminatory laws, and criminal prosecutions in “undesirable organizations” cases.8 Criminal charges for dissemination of “fake information” were routinely brought against journalists and editors of independent outlets following their reporting on Russian military atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022.9 Even in exile, Russian journalists continue to face transnational repression, including criminal convictions in absentia, intimidation of relatives, and surveillance or harassment in their country of residence.10
By April 2026, according to RSF, at least 48 journalists were imprisoned in Russia, accounting for roughly 10% of all jailed journalists worldwide.11 The figure included Russian nationals as well as captured Ukrainian journalists and staff of foreign outlets. The 2024 death in Russian custody of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna led to targeted EU (European Union) sanctions against those responsible.12
The Kremlin’s repressive strategy targets not only the journalists and outlets themselves, but also the audience’s ability to reach them. The aim is to raise the cost—in terms of time, effort, and potential punishment—of access to uncensored reporting.
Before 2022, the principal state regulator in this domain, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and the Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), blocked 30,000–60,000 websites annually, the bulk of which were accused of hosting pirated material, drug-related content, and similar categories.13 The number of blocked media outlets in the same period remained very limited, with a small spike in 2014.14 At the time, the Kremlin’s preferred way of dealing with politically irritating outlets had been to apply pressure through their owners. This was the case with the dismissal of Galina Timchenko as editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru in 2014.15 Dozens of journalists left the outlet to join Timchenko in creating the exiled outlet Meduza. A similar story unfolded at RBC in 2016, with Elizaveta Osetinskaya leaving the Russia-based outlet and later founding the independent online newspaper The Bell.16 Meanwhile, many other media in the country, run by independent and semi-independent editorial teams, remained unblocked.
The full-scale invasion changed this pattern. Roskomnadzor’s grounds for applying restrictions expanded considerably; any media outlet covering the war and citing sources other than official ones, such as the Ministry of Defense, became subject to blocking.17 By the end of 2022, 9,300 internet resources were restricted on this basis alone.18 The list included every major prewar Russian independent outlet as well as the new media projects launched by journalists in exile. In some cases, only a few days passed between a new outlet’s launch and its blocking.19 Moreover, the grounds for blocking kept expanding. In 2025, the government restricted access to 1.3m internet resources, with most targeted content related to circumvention tools and “LGBT propaganda,” which had been designated as “extremist” in Russia.20
By the second quarter of 2026, the Kremlin had also blocked every major social media platform through which independent journalistic projects could reach Russian audiences. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter were banned in the opening weeks of the war; bans on WhatsApp, YouTube, and Telegram followed in the subsequent years (see Figure 2).21 To further incentivize user migration away from these platforms, the Kremlin applies indirect pressure on content creators, imposes fines for advertising, and requires bloggers to enroll in a state registry, among other tactics.22
Simultaneously, the Kremlin has rolled out fully controlled alternatives. The Max messaging application is marketed as a replacement for Telegram and a Russian equivalent of China’s WeChat, while VK Video is presented as the domestic substitute for YouTube. Despite aggressive state promotion of these platforms, the data tell a sobering story.23 As of April 2026, the monthly reach of the formally blocked Telegram stood at 72.8m, compared with Max’s 80.6m.24 YouTube, after being banned for 1.5 years, trailed VK Video by only 17m monthly users (65.9m versus 82.9m).25
The content of blocked international platforms and media projects remains partially accessible inside Russia through virtual private networks (VPNs) and other circumvention tools. In 2020–21, the top 50 VPN applications were downloaded 5–6m times annually in Russia; that figure soared to 63m in 2022 before settling at 15–20m in 2024–25, with a sharp spike in March 2026 caused by the government’s attempt to block Telegram.26
The Kremlin has moved to close this gap in its censorship apparatus. In early 2026, roughly 450 VPN services were blocked in Russia, along with the main VPN protocols.27 Even so, both survey data and independent modeling based on search-query patterns suggest that by the second quarter of 2026, 35–40% of Russians, or 50–55m people, were using VPNs at least episodically.28 This most recent growth in the use of VPNs reflects the technology’s deeper societal penetration. It now reaches older age cohorts and social groups that are traditionally understood as dependent on the state, such as public-sector employees.29 The trend is likely due in part to schoolteachers’ pushback against the imposed use of Max as a workplace messaging app.30
It is worth noting that Roskomnadzor’s technical capabilities have grown markedly more sophisticated, increasing the burden on Russian users seeking access to blocked content.31 For example, in April 2026, the regulator ordered the 30 most-used Russian apps (including online banking platforms and mobile service providers) to detect VPN usage and suspend service for individuals found to be using the banned technology.32 To ensure reliable access, a person inside Russia now typically needs to have several VPNs running on different protocols, in addition to a dedicated circumvention device that is kept apart from the one used for ordinary Russian apps.33
Taken together, these technological barriers and pressure on users, including through prosecutions for reposts of content on social media and some initial attempts to criminalize the mere consumption of independent media, have set a high price on access to such outlets from inside Russia.34 Several media representatives interviewed for this research stressed that their content-delivery strategy derives from the assumption that people in Russia “have to have a plan for accessing alternative information.” Rather than an incidental, ambient form of consumption, it must be a deliberate practice carried out according to the user’s own rules.
These conditions have reshaped what media initiatives can realistically hope to accomplish. They seek to maximize their impact among the committed core audience that does the work of reaching them. At the same time, they must invent formats that can attract the incidental reader wherever contact is possible.
Despite the intensifying pressure since 2022, the current constellation of independent media projects constitutes a rich and varied media ecosystem, in which legacy editorial outlets coexist with the personal initiatives of journalists, bloggers, and public experts.35
By our estimate, as of the second quarter of 2026, there were 131 active media projects covering current political events and each regularly drawing at least 100,000 monthly views.36 (The views could be an aggregate number or the number on any one of the three major platforms we tracked, namely Telegram, YouTube, and the projects’ websites.)37 This media ecosystem features two basic categories of outlets that are of roughly equal importance. The first consists of editorial projects, meaning outlets with established editorial roles, regular output, and an institutional identity. The second category consists of stand-alone projects organized around a single person or a single format, such as interviews or explainers (see Figure 3).
Editorial media fall within one of the following subcategories:
This more conventional categorization is complemented by two further groupings that are defined by their primary delivery channel, which tends to shape the content itself:
Together, these media projects function as an ecosystem rather than a scattered set of survivors. The ecosystem is based on information production, analysis, amplification, and dissemination among different segments of the overall audience.
For example, general-interest outlets keep a comprehensive daily news agenda alive and available in the Russian language. This creates a common context for news consumers in Russia and beyond. Investigative teams supply the original reporting that other outlets pick up, amplify, and translate for different audience segments. Subject-focused projects in turn offer deeper coverage in domains where general-interest media lack bandwidth or expertise, sustaining a layer of professional and analytical reporting that audiences rely on for nonpolitical contexts. Region-focused outlets complement the broader coverage with local stories, which the general-interest media typically miss, and serve as a connective tissue between exiled newsrooms and on-the-ground reporting from Russia. Telegram-first projects feed the rest of the ecosystem with breaking news and exclusives that larger outlets then verify, contextualize, and develop. YouTube-first channels translate this reporting into formats designed for engagement—long-form interviews, opinion-leader commentary, regular shows—and extend its reach to audiences that are less likely to consume text-based news.
The flow of information described here is not unique to Russian independent outlets. It is a normal media pattern in democracies. What makes the Russian case distinctive is that the ecosystem functions in exile and under extreme pressure. Unlike Russian human rights organizations, which operate largely in hybrid mode, with a presence on both sides of the border, the majority of media projects work primarily outside the home country.38 They compensate for their limited ability to offer on-the-ground reporting by employing freelancers inside Russia and more advanced methods of remote cooperation with local informants.39
Russian journalist and media expert Dmitry Kolezev argues that Russian independent media are “likely to constitute the largest media community in exile in history.”40 The scale and diversity of this ecosystem keep it vibrant. Similar observations on the importance of a broader ecosystem to the survival of journalism in exile have been made in analyses of the Venezuelan and Syrian media diasporas.41
The defining impact of the independent media ecosystem is its ability to offer high-quality information about what is actually happening inside Russia, particularly in the subject areas that the Kremlin tries hard to obscure. Independent outlets regularly document the realities on the front lines of the Russian war in Ukraine and in the occupied territories, investigate war crimes, and report on the experiences and morale of ordinary Russian servicemen. They also write about political repression, targeted killings, the architecture of sanctions evasion, and much more. Much of this journalism is delivered live and through exclusive reporting, and each story chips away at the Kremlin’s official version of reality. As long as the state monopoly on information remains contested, there is an accessible factual basis for the more comprehensive work of challenging the authoritarian regime.
Independent media projects thus preserve the critical capacity to compete for agenda-setting power in the Russian information space. Data from The True Story, an independent news aggregator launched after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shows that in 2025 non-censored media projects consistently accounted for 18–20% of all original news sources in online media coverage of current affairs (see Figure 4).42 State-sponsored outlets supplied roughly 35–40% of original reporting, with the remainder drawn primarily from foreign media sources in non-Russian languages. This distribution applies only to the digital space, where competition with state media still exists.43
The substantial contributions of independent media are all the more striking given the asymmetry of opportunities between such projects and Russian state media. The difference is not only that independent outlets are blocked, exposed to political repression, and cut off from the kinds of access state outlets take for granted (official comment, press pools, the possibility to speak safely with experts and eyewitnesses inside Russia), but also that the financial divide is just as stark. According to JX Fund, the combined 2024 budget of the 63 exiled media outlets in its sample, including their own revenues and donor support, was about $84m.44 For comparison, just the direct spending on state media from the federal budget that year was 121bn rubles ($1.4bn).45 Once advertising revenues and regional subsidies are added, the actual gap is significantly wider.
Independent outlets’ enduring presence in the news flow signals something more than their continued production of exclusive reporting from inside Russia. It indicates that independent media projects have occupied a defined niche within the Russian information environment.
There are trade-offs involved in holding such a niche. Analysis from the Center for Data and Research on Russia (Cedar) suggests that most independent media content predictably concentrates on watchdog topics like repression and arrests, developments on the front line in Ukraine, or casualties and the consequences of missile and drone attacks on both sides.46 The analysis indicates that the topical concentration prevails across the entire independent media ecosystem, whereas the state media cover a far broader range of topics and thereby meet the more varied informational needs of Russian society.
Experts and donors seem to agree that the independent media tend to work on the same set of topics, partially duplicating one another, and that this effectively confines them to a similarly narrow audience segment. However, the traffic analysis below tells a different story.
Over the last few years, the independent media ecosystem has proven extremely adaptive. The initial shocks of 2022 pushed journalists to launch new outlets, relaunch old ones from exile, and double down on the platforms that remained accessible in the early years of the war, namely Telegram and YouTube. As a result of this shift, the aggregate monthly website traffic across all media projects had fallen by three to four times as of 2026 in comparison with the pre-2022 baseline.47 However, their monthly traffic on Telegram and YouTube grew four- to sixfold during the same period (see Figure 5).
An analysis of the curves between 2021 and 2026 shows that during acutely shocking news developments, traffic to independent media resources spikes, as audiences are jolted out of their habitual information routines and reach for alternatives to state propaganda.48 The Russian military’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine drove independent media’s Telegram traffic to 12 times the prewar level; the traffic then settled at four to five times the prior level, showing that a portion of the surge audience stayed on. Subsequent shocks, such as the September 2022 mobilization order, the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary forces in June 2023, or imprisoned opposition leader Aleksey Navalny’s assassination in 2024, each produced their own peaks, allowing independent outlets to retain some of the audience it gained with each influx.
Through these successive waves of crisis-driven engagement, audiences accumulated and stabilized into a settled core for most independent media outlets, including those launched after the invasion. Figure 6 plots all projects across a Telegram-YouTube traffic map, with bubble size reflecting the combined audience across all three delivery channels—Telegram, YouTube, and projects’ websites.
General-interest and investigative outlets anchor the ecosystem with a strong dual presence on Telegram and YouTube, complemented by sustained website traffic that distinguishes them from the rest. Subject- and region-focused projects form a “long tail” in the middle and lower bands of the chart: they are individually small, but collectively they cover dense thematic and territorial niches, providing the entry points for more specialized audiences. Telegram-first and YouTube-first projects, in turn, hug their respective axes, confirming that media projects hold two different audiences—one oriented toward fast text-based information and the other toward video stories.
This diversity of modes and subjects plays a significant role. By the time the Kremlin started to block YouTube in 2024 and Telegram in 2026, independent media projects’ audiences had already consolidated after the shocks of the previous years and were prepared for further disruptions, in part because they had learned to use VPNs. As a result, current government restriction efforts are struggling to break down an entrenched user base rather than a new and fragile one.
Users’ adaptation and outlets’ effective coverage of key events explains why independent media projects retain a substantial and unique audience in Russia.49 Even more significantly, this audience is capable of engaging with independent content even under the existing restrictions.
Estimating the actual audience in Russia is always a technical challenge. Beyond the traffic data in Figures 5 and 6, one needs to isolate the traffic from outside Russia and differentiate between views and unique users, both across platforms (some users follow an outlet on Telegram, YouTube, and its website all at once; others stick to a single distribution channel) and across outlets (a single user may read Meduza and watch TV Rain in parallel).
We have developed a method to address the challenge, utilizing imperfect available data. The results should still be treated as approximate. To isolate traffic from Russia, we combined publicly available audience surveys with the projects’ own assessments and geographic data analytics, which they shared with us. To deduplicate the audience, we used JX Fund’s 2023 methodology with updates from the currently available data (see Appendix for details).50
We then mapped these calculations onto three audience types that are most consistently identified by our respondents as targets of their media strategies.
Figure 7 shows the monthly unique in-Russia audience of our media projects sample, based on averaged data from January to March 2026. The core audience stands at 5.8–8.4m users per month; combined with the incidental audience, the total reaches 10–16m, and during extraordinary events the total audience can climb to the range of 17–25m.55 These estimates are broadly consistent with earlier studies, public expert assessments, and nonpublic self-estimates shared by the media managers we interviewed.56 However, the estimates rest on a number of assumptions and are best understood as indicative rather than precise.
The data above do not yet reflect the full impact of the Telegram ban imposed by the Kremlin in April 2026. Although Figure 5 shows a small spike in March, driven by several overlapping domestic crises that coincided with the Telegram blocking, preliminary estimates indicate that “editorial” projects on Telegram lost roughly 12–16% of their audience, a significantly smaller decline than that suffered by progovernment channels.57
The experience of the YouTube block suggests that the effects of platform restrictions may unfold gradually rather than immediately. After an initial traffic decline following YouTube’s throttling in 2024, media audiences returned to slower growth in 2025–26, driven primarily by the platform’s Shorts format rather than long-form video. If Telegram follows a similar pattern, the longer-term effects of its ban will become clearer in late 2026.
For each category of the audience in Russia—core, incidental, and crisis-driven users—the independent media projects do more than provide uncensored information. They perform additional functions that shape much of their actual impact on people across the country.
The outlets’ most important effects are concentrated on the core audience of regular users, people who either followed independent media before 2022 or continued engaging with them after major audience surges, and who generally align with the antiwar and democratic values to which these outlets give voice.
Most media representatives we spoke to suggested that their loyal in-Russia audience appreciates the opportunity to relate emotionally to the coverage.58 Democratic and antiwar Russians inside the country live in a regime-controlled information environment that was built to make their views look marginal, deviant, or nonexistent. Independent media routinely offer their core audience the proof that this portrayal is false, and that other Russians see the same reality, ask the same questions, and reject the same official narratives. In other words, the outlets serve as a form of epistemic anchoring, helping individuals retain a coherent picture of the world when the system that surrounds them is engineered to dismantle it. Independent media also enable people to sustain and develop their democratic, antiregime political identities.
One quality that allows the independent media ecosystem to perform these functions is the regularity of its programs. Audiences develop a relationship with specific journalists or public figures from whom they expect to hear on a fixed cadence. This is why author-driven projects like Vladislav Gorin’s regular podcast on Meduza, the weekly round-up show with Mikhail Fishman on TV Rain, or Ekaterina Shulman’s Status podcast on Ekho Moskvy have become staples of the core audience’s media diet.59
The media projects with operations in Russia enjoy a crucial amplifier to the impacts described above. Their visible presence in the country gives them a different kind of authority for the core audience in terms of emotional support and epistemic anchoring, whether through symbolic gestures at critical moments, as with Novaya Gazeta’s broadcast on the day of Aleksey Navalny’s funeral, or through routine signals of in-country location during regular reporting, as with Zhivoy Gvozd’s references to its Moscow studio.60
Some outlets reinforce all of this by engaging in deliberate community-building efforts with their in-country audience.58 The initiatives may include Telegram chats, closed channels for donors, or specific email subscriptions connected to, for example, the VPN affiliated with the outlet. Community-building activity is common not just among independent media, but also in the other two civil society sectors covered in this series of CEPA reports: human rights organizations and higher education initiatives.
Another important impact of Russian independent media is the preservation of a working public sphere, a classic function of political socialization. Independent media projects provide space for political reasoning, the formation of views, and the recognition of competing positions in a country whose political institutions no longer tolerate such processes. The survival of a genuine public sphere within the media ecosystem allows people in Russia to engage both with domestic issues—in the absence of free and fair elections—and with international issues that are not directly tied to Russia, such as the war between Israel and Hamas. As one outlet manager observed, independent media projects have come to function as an “alternative parliament” for Russia.
The diverse ecosystem of exiled media collectively covers the full scope of political positions that can no longer be represented in Russia, from the left-wing online magazine Doxa to the libertarian outlet SVTV.61 A strong core at the center of the political spectrum is supplemented by environmentalist, feminist, and Indigenous voices. News consumers encounter this pluralism, identify themselves within it, and sometimes see their positions tested in direct debate.
In rarer cases, independent media can make a direct impact on decision-making within the country, such as by drawing attention to injustices or local government failures and eliciting an official response. Despite the scale of repression from the Kremlin, this mechanism still occasionally works at the regional and municipal levels, where region-focused outlets can shift the calculus of local authorities. Subject-focused outlets sometimes play a similar role, acting almost as human rights organizations by trying to halt repression against a specific individual through coverage alone. According to two regional editors we interviewed, such cases produce a brief but powerful surge of shared agency among their audiences. The incidents provide confirmation that, even now, certain things inside Russia can be moved through public pressure.
Finally, a further impact stems from a shift in the perception of independent media’s basic mission. Audience members no longer perceive them merely as news publishers. As one media manager put it, independent outlets have become people’s “partner in survival.” The most consequential development in this direction is a trend in which the majority of editorial outlets and even some YouTube influencers have built out and disseminated in-house VPN networks that are secure and durable in the face of official blocking.62 Independent media have also expanded the nature of their content since 2022 to include, for example, instructions on how to prepare for blockings and shutdowns, behave during police searches, talk to family members who consume state propaganda, and withstand the constant pressure of an antidemocratic environment.63
The types of impact described here are corroborated by indirect signals from the core audience itself. One of the largest general-interest media projects, Meduza, maintains a crowdfunding platform on which its in-Russia readers can leave messages asking supporters abroad to contribute on their behalf and often explaining why access to Meduza matters to them.64 The dominant narratives in these testimonials skew strongly toward emotional themes. People who mention hope for a different Russian future, the sense of not being alone, and finding a corner of normalcy together account for almost 50% of all messages (see Figure 8).65 A more analytical attitude toward media, stressing the desire to access alternative information, appears in a quarter of the messages. Even allowing for self-selection among those who choose to write such testimonials, the distribution underscores the idea that what independent media deliver is not primarily factual information, but an emotional climate and political framing in which factual information continues to matter.
The impact that independent media achieve with incidental users is smaller in magnitude than with the core audience, but reaching this layer of news consumers remains a sustained editorial priority. Our media-manager respondents identified two distinct subcategories within the incidental audience, each of which requires its own strategy.
The first subcategory consists of people whose views are not fully aligned with the outlets’ positions on the war in Ukraine or the political regime in Russia. These individuals typically have a skeptical or ambivalent attitude toward what happens in the world. The media projects’ mission with this group is to prevent the kind of disengagement that the Kremlin-controlled information environment is designed to produce: “looking away,” normalizing the war, treating it as a separate sphere unconnected to daily life.66 Independent outlets seek to prevent this by attributing responsibility and drawing causal links that the state media work hard to obscure, for example by showing the interconnections among rising prices, interrupted internet access, disruptions in medication supplies, visa restrictions, and the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. When an incidental encounter with independent media content delivers that linkage, even briefly, it produces a more complete picture of reality than the state media can produce.
The second subcategory is different in character, consisting of people who avoid political content not out of ambivalence but as part of a conscious strategy of news avoidance, which, paradoxically, often aligns with the values espoused by independent media. For this audience, media projects attempt to offer something other than news: cultural coverage, history, parenting shows, podcasts, and long-form videos on themes that satisfy the need for a value-consonant kind of escapism. But because the media ecosystem’s functions are intertwined, with overlapping audiences, cross-references, and partner-project recommendations, habituating a user to one non-news format opens a path toward the news-oriented work of adjacent outlets. What begins as cultural or lifestyle consumption can, over time, become political consumption.
Crisis-driven users are often skeptical of both independent media projects and state media in general, and do not necessarily share the core audience’s pro-democracy outlook. What draws them in is practical need: during events such as military mobilization, large-scale mutiny, or external military invasion, independent media provide timely, actionable information that is not available on state media.
The extra impact related to this audience derives from its recurring return to independent media during critical moments. Even episodic engagement means that Russian independent media projects remain part of people’s cognitive map of available information sources, preventing the Kremlin from fully closing the information landscape and creating a purely state-controlled space. As long as this latent media pluralism survives, citizens will know they have a place to turn for alternative information during any future rupture in the official narrative, whether it is caused by an economic crisis or political instability.67
The independent media projects’ adaptability, as described above, should not be overstated. In 2026, the sector is in a state of accumulated operational, financial, and emotional strain. Nearly every media manager and journalist we spoke to reported some version of burnout, exhaustion, or doubt about continuing the work at its current level of intensity. The pressures that produce this strain fall into three broad categories: (1) a worsening of the news avoidance problem; (2) financial precarity and talent drain, sharpened by the 2025 international donor crisis; and (3) a lack of responsiveness from the global technology companies on which they depend.
The most immediate constraint on independent media’s impact is the steady drift of audiences away from the types of reporting that they do best. In the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, a growing share of the audience in Russia, including the core and incidental users, started to actively avoid news that touched on the war, political repression, and deteriorating conditions in Russia. One media manager we interviewed captured this with a wry inversion: “instead of FOMO [fear of missing out] we are dealing with FOFO [fear of finding out].” The reality that independent media illuminate is objectively grim; individual users are largely powerless to change it, and engagement carries a real cost.
Media projects have responded with format experimentation, testing out lighter tones, more cultural and historical content, lifestyle subprojects, and the like. However, with rare exceptions, these efforts have not converted into audience growth, particularly for general-interest outlets whose subprojects in the non-news territory receive dozens of times less traffic than their main channels.68 The drift is compounded by external forces. Roskomnadzor’s crackdown on circumvention tools can incentivize users who lost access to one VPN to disengage from “negative” exiled content altogether rather than seek out another. Another problem originates from the outlets’ relations with donors: grant funding and reporting requirements indirectly incentivize niche outlets to broaden their scope and expand into the domain of general news. As a result, there is now an oversupply in this area, with multiple outlets covering the same stories in similar ways, which can reinforce the audience’s sentiments behind general news avoidance.
The 2025 donor crisis hit independent media initiatives especially hard. Previously US funding had accounted for up to 40% of their total annual budgets.69 Having been cut off from both the Russian advertising market and a major external funding source, newsrooms spent 2025–26 experimenting with adjacent revenue streams: book delivery, merchandise, educational courses, and even information-technology consulting.70 Aside from some stand-alone YouTube channels supported by monetization, no midsize or large media outlet covered more than 25–30% of its costs through earned income and audience donations combined.71 Beyond the limited returns, the alternative revenue-seeking activities carry a strategic cost by diverting attention from journalism itself. As one media manager explained: “it was not for the sake of opening shops or doing consultancy that we left Russia and are now criminally prosecuted.”
The cumulative effect is an accelerating talent drain that compounds two decades of Kremlin-driven degradation of the journalistic profession. Already in 2024, some journalists left the sector, including nonpublic staff who returned to Russia, due to burnout and financial pressure.72 Over the last year, 18 of the 23 projects whose representatives we interviewed had to lay off staff. More broadly, the sector is shifting from salaried newsrooms toward leaner editor-and-freelancer models, reducing the numbers of more secure permanent employees and shrinking capacity for long-form and investigative reporting.73 With few new entrants joining independent journalism, and many talented young journalists in Russia instead entering the well-funded state media sector, this trend is unlikely to be reversed.74
The third constraint on the independent media is the failure to build any working coordination with the global technology platforms that serve as vehicles for content distribution. Despite repeated efforts, Russian independent media projects have been unable to restore YouTube monetization for Russia-based viewers since it was canceled at the start of the full-scale invasion, or to persuade Google to recalibrate its search and Discover algorithms, which continue to demote sites blocked inside Russia regardless of the political character of the blocking.75 YouTube and Google have taken some positive steps by removing major Russian propaganda channels from their platforms, and partly reducing the algorithmic surfacing of state-aligned narratives.76 Yet major global technology platforms reportedly continue to act on Kremlin requests by pulling independent media apps and VPN clients from their app stores.77 Appeals have come from the media sector, the Russian opposition, and European politicians, but they have not been sufficient to establish a stable channel of communication that goes beyond standard user-support tickets.78
As a result, independent media and their Russian users are left on their own to face the regime’s machinery of restrictive regulation and the construction of an insulated Russian internet. This is an unequal contest, with the state commanding effectively unlimited administrative and technical resources. If the major global platforms were to afford even modest but sustained engagement with the independent media by creating clearer escalation channels, reversing automated penalties applied to blocked domains, and allowing for targeted exemptions in monetization policy, this would meaningfully tilt the asymmetry and support independent voices working against any authoritarian information regime, not only the Russian one.
In 2026, the Russian independent media sector presents a mixed picture. The Kremlin’s pressure on independent journalism stretches back more than two decades, and its full-scale war against Ukraine has turned an already harsh domestic environment into something far more brutal and unforgiving. The country’s most dedicated media professionals have risen to the challenge, building an information ecosystem in exile that remains diverse and influential despite ongoing authoritarian attacks. At the same time, accumulated infrastructural and human-resource constraints increasingly limit its long-term sustainability. For democratic governments and donors, the situation suggests not only that continued support is needed, but also that the model of support itself requires rethinking.
To that end, we propose the following approaches:
1. Adapt support to the diversity of the independent media ecosystem.
2. Facilitate direct coordination between global tech companies and independent media.
3. Treat independent media projects as strategic assets for democratic states, not just as recipients of support.
The survival of Russian media in exile is important in its own right, but it is also a test for the larger question of whether the liberal democratic order can sustain independent voices operating under authoritarian pressure around the world. Democratic societies are already subjected to massive information manipulation campaigns by authoritarian actors. One way to contest these corrosive campaigns, which harm the security interests of democracies across and beyond the transatlantic community, is to provide critical exiled media initiatives with the support necessary to maintain their resilience, their capacity to innovate, and their ability to break through the information controls of regimes like the one in Russia. In the absence of such sustained support, the prospects for a more accountable and peaceful Russia will shrink, while the malign activities that the Kremlin projects into democratic societies continue apace.
If the Russian independent media ecosystem ultimately cannot endure the current harsh conditions, its demise would send a signal to journalists from China, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, and other semi-free and unfree countries that exile journalism has no long-term future, and the shared infrastructure of free expression that democracies depend on would become that much weaker.
The dataset on Russian independent media projects’ traffic indicators was built from a combination of publicly available platform metrics, third-party analytics, internally shared data, and previously published research. The sources and processing methods are described below, in line with the three analytical tasks the dataset was designed to support.
1. Aggregating main traffic indicators
2. Estimating the share of the in-Russia audience
The in-Russia share of independent media projects’ audiences cannot be measured precisely, given platform blockings and widespread use of circumvention tools. We therefore triangulated four types of indicators.
Across these four sources we obtained a value on at least one platform for 28 projects from our sample. These served as anchors for a predictive regression model, calibrated on media type and the platform-level traffic volumes from Step 1, which we used to estimate the in-Russia audience share for each of the three platforms across every project in our sample. The model produced low, medium, and high estimates for each project, and these three scenarios were used in all subsequent calculations.
3. Estimating the unique deduplicated audience
The overall methodology for the estimation of the deduplicated in-Russia audience was built on the model proposed by JX Fund in its 2023 report.82 JX Fund treats exiled media reach as the sum of platform-level unique users, then strips out three layers of double counting: (1) same person on multiple devices visiting the same site (~12% duplication on outlets), (2) same person reading more than one exiled media outlet at once (cross-media factor of 1.1–1.6x on sites, 2.7x on YouTube, 6.7x on Telegram), and (3) same person following the same project on several platforms (Hootsuite-derived ~20% multiplatform overlap). Finally, JX Fund adds a single 10–20% multiplier for audiences arriving via TikTok, word-of-mouth, and other platforms not covered via initial calculations.
We keep this logic for our research across three platforms (websites, Telegram, YouTube), but apply it for our larger independent media projects sample (132 projects), for a more recent period of time (January to March 2026) and replace the single 10–20% additional reach multiplier with two explicit behavioral tiers: incidental and crisis-driven, alongside the JX Fund–style core habitual tier. We also recalibrate the JX Fund assumptions’ for deduplicating coefficients, wherever we can based on initial platform data, collected in Steps 1 and 2, as follows:
Five additional coefficients have no JX Fund analogue and are anchored on traffic data, media project interviews, and survey-based priors or comparable market benchmarks where none of the above applies. These are:
The three tiers were summed at the end, with within- and cross-platform deduplication applied inside each tier. In our quarterly headline (Q1 2026), the сore tier—JX Fund’s habitual readership recalibrated as above—lands at 5.8m / 6.9m / 8.4m in the low / middle / high scenarios. On top of that, the incidental tier adds 4.6m / 5.7m / 7.8m, and the crisis-driven tier adds 6.9m / 8.2m / 9.2m over core.
Despite severe repression, Russian civil society groups remain a critical bastion for democracy.
Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a political scientist and Russia expert focusing on elites, the bureaucracy, government data, and the policymaking process.
Dr. Evgeny Roshchin leads the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of “Professorial Silence”, “Exit as Voice”, “Crime and Punishment in International Politics” and many other academic articles, and media commentaries.
The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian civil society organizations and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. The authors are grateful to CEPA staff members Christopher Walker, Michael Newton, David Kagan, Isabella Nieminen, and Talia Martin, whose editorial and production support were invaluable elements of the release of this report. The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian independent media projects and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. They also extend personal thanks to Dmitry Kolezev, journalist and founder of the YouScore project; Lev Gershenzon, founder of The True Story news aggregator; and Alesya Sokolova, researcher at the CEDAR think tank, for the data they provided for the quantitative part of this research.
Mikhail Komin would also like to express his gratitude to his wife, Dr. Viktoria P., and his friend, Mr. Churchill the Dog, whose steady support helped him navigate the personal and professional challenges of 2026 and complete this report.
CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
The post An Ecosystem of Truth: Russian Independent Media in Exile appeared first on CEPA.
2026-06-26 03:03:17
Higher education institutions have historically served as incubators of critical thinking, civic engagement, and democratic values. Russian higher education is no exception. Although academic freedom and institutional autonomy have been gradually eroded with the consolidation of the authoritarian regime, many Russian universities remained among the last institutional spaces where independent inquiry and exposure to plural perspectives could be sustained.
Academics became one of the few professional groups to collectively organize protests against the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The protests took a variety of forms, including petitions and street pickets. Equally significant was the large-scale exodus of Russian academics from the country. Many of those who left went on to launch educational initiatives in exile, bringing together scores of displaced faculty members and becoming new centers of independent learning. These initiatives include Svobodny Universitet (Free University), the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLAS), the Smolny-Bard program, and others. Together, they constitute a visible and substantial landscape of independent academic life in exile. It is comparable in scale to the clusters of intellectual activity that had previously thrived around leading private universities in Russia, such as Shaninka, the EUSP, and Smolny College, as well as the prominent state research university, the Higher School of Economics (HSE), all of which are based in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
This report examines Russian educational projects established by scholars and activists who left the country prior to and after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It explores the objectives of these exiled initiatives, the audiences they address, and the types of impact they seek to achieve. It also identifies their most effective strategies, as well as the main constraints they face.
In this report, we differentiate the following types of Russian post-2022 HEPs in exile: (1) HEPs as such, (2) research centers (RCs), and (3) civic education initiatives (CEIs) aimed at fostering dialogue among various groups involved in Russian activism and education in exile. At the same time, these categories are not mutually exclusive, and their functions often overlap in practice. The scope of the report is limited to educational initiatives for adults and does not include projects designed for children in Russia or in Russian-speaking diaspora populations.
The report is organized into five parts.
First, it outlines the political landscape of higher education in Russia, which has become far more repressive since 2022. The report explains the rationale behind the emergence of exiled educational initiatives and how hybrid education has become a practical and necessary response by independent academics to a consolidated authoritarian system.
Second, the report examines the organizational forms of exiled projects and their main objectives in engaging students and peers both inside and outside the country. Third, it analyzes the challenges that arise from the chosen strategies, including those that limit the intended impact. Fourth, it identifies the key obstacles for educational initiatives operating in exile. Fifth, it discusses donors’ priorities in relation to this emerging group of grantees and their vision for educational goals.
The analysis draws on 24 interviews conducted in 2025–26 with representatives of the three HEP types identified above, as well as with international donors.1
HEPs in exile are not a new phenomenon. Periods of democratic decline have given rise to comparable initiatives in the past, such as “Off-University” from Turkey and the Belarusian-Lithuanian European Humanities University (EHU). Yet Russian HEPs are shaped by a distinct set of conditions, including a specific geopolitical context, the scale and intensity of repression in Russia, and the need for continuous innovation to sustain societal impact. They are directly affected by the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, as opposition to the war has compelled many of their members to leave the country.
Russian HEPs thus reflect a broader reality in which intensified repression coexists with creative educational innovation as a form of resistance. They demonstrate measurable financial and operational resilience, despite the international funding crisis triggered by the 2025 dismantling of the US Agency for International Development. They have also adapted to repression in the form of discriminatory designations by the Russian government and have implemented functional security protocols for learners operating under conditions of digital surveillance. Some HEPs have evolved into more institutionalized organizations and are gradually moving toward integration into the higher education systems of foreign democracies. Thanks to such evolution and adaptations, the projects command a sustained demand from audiences in Russia, underscoring their continued impact. Taken together, these developments constitute a new chapter of democratic resilience in response to the onslaught of a more technologically advanced and politically extreme authoritarian regime.
Since 1991, Russian higher education has moved from a period of attempted modernization and internationalization to the systematic repression of state-critical voices and increasing control of academic institutions by Vladimir Putin’s regime. In 2026, Russia was set to fully withdraw from the Bologna Process, in which the country had participated since 2003.2 As the data below demonstrate, Russian higher education currently operates under a qualitatively different set of circumstances from those of the past, affecting academic integrity, university autonomy, and the reach of censorship and self-censorship.
Russia’s performance on the Academic Freedom Index (Figure 1) produced by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project reflects a dramatic deterioration over time, from high scores in the 1990s and gradual erosion in the 2000s to a sharp decline since Putin’s third presidential term in 2012 and the post–February 2022 crackdown. By 2024, the scores were approaching the minimum possible values.3
Figure 1. Russia on the Academic Freedom Index, 1990–2025
Although the state’s attacks on liberal-minded activists, academics, and universities in Russia began well before February 2022, particularly with the enactment of the “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations” laws in 2012 and 2015, it was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that triggered an unprecedented wave of repression against these targets.
The Russian human rights watchdog OVD-Info has reported the increasing number of academics and educational entities that have been designated as “foreign agents” or “undesirable” in 2021-2025. Those labeled “foreign agents” increased from 4 to 91, and those classified as “undesirable organizations” rose from 5 to 53.4
OVD-Info data clearly show that since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russian students have become a priority focus of government scrutiny. Chart 2 illustrates the rise in cases of students being forced to take part in state-backed political events.
Figure 2. Incidents of Persecution at Russian Universities, 2022–24.5
Since 2022, OVD-Info has recorded at least 220 cases of political persecution of lecturers and schoolteachers, though experts believe the actual figures may be considerably higher.6 Data on criminal cases opened against students and academic staff show a sharp spike in 2022 and 2023 to nearly double the annual figure recorded before the full-scale invasion (In Figure 3, the low number for 2025 is due to the cited research ending in Spring 2025).
Figure 3. Criminal Cases Against Russian Students and University Teaching Staff, 2012–25.7
In protest of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine and its authoritarian policies, many scholars have fled the country. Their exact number remains uncertain, with estimates ranging from 2,500 to 12,000.89 These departures have had a major impact on Russian academia. The levels of intellectual debate and the diversity of views have plummeted to historically unprecedented lows. Research on topics that the government considers sensitive has become impossible. Similarly, public expertise has become pliant and biased, making it an unreliable source of knowledge.
Against the backdrop of intensifying repression, Russian higher education institutions, including those that once represented the liberal academy, are being actively harnessed for the state’s war objectives. In the first month following the full-scale invasion, in March 2022, the rectors of 184 prominent Russian universities formally expressed their support for the “special military operation.”10 Acting on orders from the Kremlin, the universities subsequently revised their post-2022 curriculums to include two compulsory courses— “The Foundations of Russian Statehood” and “History of Russia” —that were designed less to educate than to indoctrinate.11
The government’s elevated interest in patriotic education is further reflected in the allocation of university and public research funding. Already in 2023, nearly 70 percent of grant applications approved by the Russian Science Foundation referenced patriotism in some form. Some of the allocations supported projects aimed at the “transition of power” in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories.12
The growing militarization of Russian higher education is made visible by the expansion of military training centers at Russian universities. Between 2022 and 2026, the number of such centers increased by 36, rising from 114 to 150.13 The facilities provide basic military training to male students, leaving them with the status of a reserve officer or enlisted serviceman upon graduation. Although attendance remains nominally voluntary at some institutions, consistent reports since 2022 have indicated mounting pressure on students to enroll. In early 2026, Minister of Science and Higher Education Valery Falkov said universities would be tasked with ensuring that at least 2 percent of students sign contracts with the Ministry of Defence.14
According to Faridaily, documents prepared by the Ministry of Defence for internal use, and inadvertently published on the websites of several colleges, indicate that Russian authorities plan to recruit 78,800 personnel into the military’s Unmanned Systems Forces (VBS) this year, including through student enlistment.15
The Russian student dissident media outlet Groza has identified at least 182 universities and 64 colleges in Russia that are actively promoting contract service in the VBS among their students. Recruitment efforts have also been identified in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, including at 8 universities in Crimea and 15 universities in the occupied portions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.16
In this context of intensified repression and militarization, professors who were committed to the values of free teaching and research sought to launch educational projects that would allow people residing in Russia—young people in particular, who remain mostly Western-oriented—to engage in independent learning and critical thinking. Under Russia’s authoritarian regime, the expression of such values amounts to dissent, support for democracy, and denunciation of the war.
Three years is a short time for the maturation of an educational project, but some Russian HEPs in exile have undergone a remarkable evolution. They emerged from the networks of displaced scholars to become cohesive teams and even institutions. Drawing on existing research on exiled education, this report distinguishes between different types of HEPs based on their method and language of teaching; relations with the national education system in host countries, including academic accreditation; and the type of financial support they receive.17
We have examined seven distinct HEPs. Four of them operate online, while three offer in-person instruction. In five HEPs, the primary language of instruction is Russian; in the remaining two, it is English. English instruction occurs in one online and one in-person HEP.
Two online and two “in-person” HEPs charge tuition fees for the entire programs: three of these four offer full scholarships. The remaining three HEPs of the seven studied charge fees for individual courses. Three HEPs receive accreditation either from the host country in the case of exiled HEPs, or from an international body. Online HEPs enroll the largest number of students overall, as well as the largest number of students from Russia (Figure 4).18
Figure 4. Russian Higher Education Projects in Exile, 2025–26.
From the outset, all HEPs faced choices about how institutionalized and embedded they would aim to be in exile, and whether they would prioritize engaging people in host countries or the audiences that remained in Russia. These two alternative strategies proved to be mutually exclusive, affecting the decision to institutionalize.
The least institutionalized HEPs, in the sense of formal establishment in the host country, tend to attract the highest proportion of students who reside in Russia. A striking example is Svobodny Universitet, which brings together up to 300 instructors from around the world and has “graduated” approximately 20,600 students over the past five years.
Despite Moscow’s decision to designate it as an “undesirable organization,” the number of enrolled students at Svobodny Universitet fell by only 10–12% in the year following the designation. The move thus had no significant impact on the university’s ability to engage with Russian audiences. This project is rather unique in terms of both the number of students overall and the number of students who join from Russia. Yet other online HEPs also report a sizable share of students based in Russia, at the level of approximately 40–45%. Notably, the fact that these HEPs cannot offer formal degrees does not affect their ability to attract participants from Russia.
Considerations of potential impact are further complicated by the circumstances in which the exiled HEPs were launched. In response to the regime’s crackdown on academic freedom and large-scale displacement, the initiatives were driven to reconstruct the broken horizontal ties in the academic community.
As a result, the impact of the exiled HEPs could be viewed through the lens of their four key functions:
In the immediate aftermath of the Russian regime’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both online and in-person Russian HEPs in exile provided a collective emotional support role. The state’s crackdown on protest, the adoption of censorship laws, and abrupt decisions to emigrate left many professors and students stranded, powerless vis-à-vis the regime, and socially isolated. The HEPs stepped in and offered “spaces of normalcy” for their audiences, ensuring that the war and domestic political developments could be discussed without fear of punishment.
Yet in 2023, this function started to give way to educational content. Instead of commentary on the war and persecutions (in which participation could put students joining from Russia at risk) the focus shifted to a more academic discussion of various subjects, including those related to the war and the functioning of the authoritarian regime.
As one representative of an online HEP (HEP5) observed: “We don’t discuss ways to overthrow the Russian government at our school. Instead, we discuss politics in general.”
This evolution in emphasis – and, by extension, self-understanding – is what marked the shift in rationale toward more long-term and substantive impact. Organizers recognized that their initiatives could become vehicles for maintaining unconstrained discussion and nurturing critical thinking in the Russian language, facilitated by people who had firsthand experience with authoritarian repression. Such a service is crucial in light of the ideology-laden teaching and highly cryptic discussions that prevail in university classrooms inside Russia.
To earn a broader appeal among Russian-speaking students, the subject matter was bound to switch from activist topics to more practical learning and knowledge transmission. Students who join the HEPs are seeking tools that could help them navigate the existing regime or grow professionally in their fields.
The community-building function is another valuable service that the HEPs can provide in an authoritarian system that thrives on social atomization, particularly among critically minded citizens. The new virtual HEPs have become a sort of connective tissue for academic circles that are scattered across Russia and the world, granting them opportunities to discuss their research and teaching and to expose their work to open scrutiny in the world of “free knowledge.”
The operating conditions of these HEPs differ considerably, particularly in terms of the security risks faced by participants inside Russia compared with those abroad. In some cases, they opt to preserve open discussion through stricter security protocols and even degrees of anonymity. Communication becomes less formal, taking place on social media platforms and closed channels among faculty. The payoff for such an adaptation is the ability to attract hundreds of students to a single project of this type (HEP2). However, only less institutionalized, network-like HEPs have the flexibility to take this approach.
Finally, by integrating with host countries’ academic systems, HEPs can become intermediaries for Russian students who plan to pursue education and career opportunities outside of their home country. Their teaching style helps students adapt to international academic practices. These HEPs can also provide educational certificates, and their faculty members can offer informal mentorship and write recommendation letters.
Given their limited access to exchange programs and Western institutions more broadly, Russian students are often deprived of the means to bolster their portfolios and credentials should they choose to apply to foreign universities. Some of the new HEPs have thus become mediators of the outward movement of students from Russia.
Since such movement requires formal certification and authentication, it can only be facilitated by the most institutionalized HEPs in exile, whether they operate online or in person (HEP6, HEP7).
The functions that an HEP chooses to prioritize naturally come with a particular set of tradeoffs. For example, the choice to offer a formal degree or an educational certificate is likely to entail greater institutional formalization and rigidity, and closer ties to the host country’s academic system. More fundamentally, it would assist the outflow of students from Russia. This type of impact would remain modest as well, since only a few students join such projects, and the initiatives would need to compete with normal foreign universities based in democratic countries.
The alternative choice to continue making an impact inside the home country is likely to involve less formalization, more limited opportunities for degree provision, stricter security protocols, and greater anonymity in teaching. This approach does not require institutionalization in host societies. The benefits include the ability to mobilize a large network of displaced professors and to recruit a far greater number of students than the more institutionalized initiatives.
As with many other immigrant communities, Russian exiles face the challenge of negotiating the balance of commitments to their home and host societies. There is no such thing as the “right” balance, but the challenge itself means that educational programming on offer in the host society may not be of interest to those concerned with life under an oppressive regime. Students in or focused on Russia would be thirsty for ideas and solutions that would help bring about reform, while those focused on the wider world would be driven by a fundamentally different set of priorities.
In the context of Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the solidarity of Russian exiles with Ukrainians, educational initiatives led by Russian academics operate under much greater political and moral constraints than those run by exiles from other authoritarian states. Every choice about programmatic format, institutionalization or informal convening, or teaching subjects and fields inevitably involves weighing specific kinds of goals and political costs against others.
One of the basic choices that the HEPs had to make is whether they should attempt to institutionalize by recreating their oftentimes elite academic institutions in the new setting. This choice was driven by several considerations, including the need for jobs and immigration status among displaced professors and the pressure to compete for students by offering recognized diplomas.
An opportunity to run a formally established educational program in exile is one of the safest ways to maintain unconstrained discussion in the classroom and to offer students career prospects that would not be limited to Russia alone. At the same time, anchoring a project in the new host country requires steps toward local integration, including the recruitment of local faculty members and enrollment in local organizations and professional associations. Furthermore, such a choice significantly reduces the initiative’s access to a broader audience that could participate virtually from the home society.
Most of our experts noted the challenges of launching formally instituted educational programs in the new national settings. One of the main problems is lack of trust.
Local authorities sometimes refuse to register these initiatives, citing security concerns associated with their country of origin. Our experts mentioned difficulties registering their educational projects in several European countries, where the initiatives were rejected as untrustworthy, despite the organizers’ dissident status in Russia and years of educational collaboration with local universities (HEP6).
For their part, the representatives of these initiatives reported a lack of trust in fair and consistent implementation of host countries’ regulations. In their view, more transparent rules governing the Russian academic community and educational initiatives in exile would make life easier for everyone involved. As one of them observed:
We want this policy to be at least transparent. So that it is clear what we must not do, or that there is a red light, or there is ‘no entry’… but nowhere does a policy actually say that Russian citizens aren’t welcome. What we have in reality is that we prepare required documents, go through an interview, and we’re even told everything looks fine. And then we hear: “Oh, you know, you’re a Russian citizen” (CEI1).
Those initiatives that were more successful in institutionalizing, such as FLAS or the Master of Arts program in Russian studies at Charles University, struggle with other bureaucratic challenges. For example, receiving students from Russia, who would like to access the free academic environment created by the exiled Russian initiatives, can become a challenge due to immigration regulations. Students from Russia who were admitted to the Charles University master’s program experienced difficulties obtaining student visas from the government of the Czech Republic.19
The choices these initiatives make regarding the exact shape of their institutionalization (for example, an in-person, degree-issuing program), their institutional culture, and their area of focus reflect the impact that they hope to make.
The first and central dilemma for most HEPs is whether institutionalization, with its ensuing obligations to integrate locally, is desirable at all. Such a path prioritizes students who have the means to leave Russia. It is also influenced by local educational rules. Conversely, a decision not to institutionalize provides more opportunities to engage with students in Russia. Individual initiatives are taking different paths, and there is currently no consensus on this issue in the community.
Second, many displaced scholars represent a distinct academic culture of free discussion and high-quality instruction. This culture developed in prestigious Russian universities, both private, like Shaninka and the EUSP, and public, like the HSE.
In exile, former professors from these institutions tend to reproduce their culture and continue to identify with their original ethos. HEPs attempt to preserve traditions and the “guild spirit” of the projects previously built in Russia. As one expert put it: “We deliberately use the brand [of their university]. When we created our school, our former university opposed it … but we used it anyway” (HEP2).
Third, the issue of institutional identification is further complicated by the country-focused research expertise among the members of these initiatives. Together, the latter two factors contribute to identity and integration dilemmas that cannot be resolved without consequences for the project’s potential impact.
The exiled academic community is divided over specific strategies. One group is convinced that the exiles cannot remain in their bubbles and stresses the necessity of collaborating with local communities. This position is reflected in the example of one of our experts. His research center received a grant to support Russian scholars in exile. In his opinion, this fact does not turn the center into “a center for Russian studies.” In his view, the center should adapt its agenda to the host country and participate in broader analytical debates (RC 1). Others are even more ambitious in attempting to make the Russian exiles contributors to the global discussion of democratic norms and politics.
Another group of scholars sees benefits in “moderate intellectual ghettoization” within the academic culture of the host society. As one expert pointed out:
There are different kinds of integration. Consider the example of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin [1926–43]: it began with oaths of hatred toward the Bolsheviks and ended as a part of the Nazis’ Ministry of Propaganda because it decided it needed to respect the local context as much as possible. We do not believe in fully integrating into the local agenda of the host country (HEP5).
Overall, integration implies greater involvement by local faculty in the work of the HEPs and research centers, the expansion of expertise beyond the country of origin, adaptation to local government regulations, and prioritizing English as the language of instruction. The implication is that the HEPs will become less exclusively exiled, less oriented toward a future change in the home society, and more normalized as research or educational projects in the global academic community.
HEP members recognize that a push for integration may prove problematic, noting that they are perceived by the local academic community as “temporary ‘relocatees’ and unwelcome competitors” (RC2). The choice in favor of local integration is constrained by competition with existing universities, including for their resources and the prestige of their diplomas, and by the mismatch in teaching and research qualifications. As a result, the HEPs’ offerings may be less attractive, and their impact may be limited in both host and home societies.
By contrast, projects that pursue a strategy of preserving stronger identification with their own tradition and country expertise, as well as keeping Russian as the language of instruction, are effectively focused on ensuring that Russia’s internationalized academic culture survives outside its borders until conditions allow for its return.
This strategy aims to make an impact by providing access to nonideological education in the Russian language and with a Russian democratic context. Its mission is to maintain a cutting-edge and country-focused intellectual agenda that could help to revive domestic Russian academia in the future. The main challenge for this strategy is its less certain financial sustainability.
In addition to the challenges associated with the identification dilemma, the HEPs and research initiatives face a series of constraints stemming from their “exiled” status. The Russian authoritarian regime was quick to identify exiled Russian academics as a serious threat, designating individual professors and entire educational projects as “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations.”
Political constraints in the form of state persecutions are one of the main objective factors in the strategies of exiled HEPs. On the one hand, an organization’s designation as “undesirable” did not cause a significant decline in its Russian audience. On the other hand, those without such a designation have tried to avoid it out of concern for the safety of their Russian audience and their own staff, as any engagement with a designated group can draw criminal prosecution in Russia. Attempts to avoid designation have translated into what experts identified as HEPs’ often depoliticized public agendas (RC1, RC2).
Security challenges are the consequence of political persecution and stringent wartime censorship laws in Russia. As with Russian human rights organizations (see the first report), HEPs have made developing robust safety protocols a high priority. They apply to class delivery and student recruitment, with the aim of minimizing risk to good-faith participants and guarding against potential provocations by Russian authorities.
Technological constraints are also unavoidable when operating in this environment. Russian participants must have secure internet access to interact safely with virtual HEPs. As Russian authorities intensify their online censorship efforts and directly target anonymization tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) and encrypted messaging applications, the need to develop reliable methods for circumventing state information controls represents one of the most urgent and consequential challenges facing exiled HEPs today.
Financial constraints are another key obstacle that derives from the nature of these ad hoc initiatives. Although HEPs have adopted a range of survival strategies, from heavy reliance on grant funding (covering both large and small projects) to charging tuition fees, all experts reported significant financial difficulties that effectively prevent any long-term planning. The average planning horizon among the surveyed HEPs in exile is just one to two years.
Faculty members remain in an extremely precarious situation, having left Russia in protest and without a sustainable financial plan. Only a few have found stable academic positions, while most still struggle to obtain fellowships or are even forced to change their profession. All of the factors above effectively erode human capital and further disrupt HEPs’ planning efforts.
Financial precarity is exacerbated by the fact that the main US and European donors have themselves been designated as “undesirable organizations” by the Russian government. This creates an extra risk for faculty who join exiled HEPs from Russia, have relatives in Russia, or have a less stable immigration status in the host country.
Most exiled Russian educational and research initiatives depend on support from donors and host-country institutions. Yet the ecosystem of HEPs and CEIs is marked by a certain discrepancy between the long-term goals of donors and the immediate needs of exiled initiatives. While the latter are often focused on survival, the former are driven by a “future-oriented” paradigm, anticipating the return of academic initiatives to Russia “when the time comes.”20
In fact, the core assumption held by many donors is that their work constitutes a strategic investment in a future democratic Russia. However, the exiled HEPs are primarily concerned with their durable reconstitution outside the country, as any return home is not a realistic prospect in the near term. This leads to a gap between the practical expectations of donors, who prioritize funding for projects that target Russian audiences, and those of exiled academics, who may be occupied with covering monthly bills or the task of establishing themselves professionally outside Russia.
Donors navigate this terrain with varying strategies. For example, US donors maintain the classic return-oriented mandate, stating that their objective in the broadest terms is support for democratic change in Russia through the preservation of democratic activity, a democratic mindset, and democratic networks inside the country (DON3, DON5). They view education in exile as a means to preserve “spaces for free thought” that could benefit Russian society in the future (DON3). Non-US donors similarly operate with the “exile consciousness” framework, stressing the need to work out policy toward Russia for the period after the war concludes (DON1).
Donors’ support for Russian HEPs and CEIs in exile generally falls within one of two main categories:
With respect to the specificity of educational initiatives, some donors have developed a more nuanced approach to funding. As one of them suggested, the measurable outcomes could be less important than the underlying values embedded in the project (DON2). In her words:
“We take the view that when people find a way to do something—something important, something that serves a broader public good—we look at these projects and try to help.
We approach this question quite pragmatically. We do not expect people to bring about regime change, nor do we require that they land in prison as a result of their activities, thereby somehow undermining or altering the regime. That would simply be unrealistic. I would say that our support rests on two considerations. First, we want to see that people who have the opportunity, who are motivated by some form of publicly beneficial activity, are able to continue that work. And second, we assess that the effect of this work—that is, the benefit to society, or certain segments of it—is real (DON2).”
These donors affirm their commitment to the long-term goal of democratic transformation, while remaining clear-eyed about the obstacles of the present moment. One donor described their approach as operating within a five-year window, recognizing that political change could either happen suddenly or require consistent effort over time (DON4). For some donors, the main goal with respect to Russian education and activist initiatives in exile is to support the small group of dedicated individuals and maintain modest forms of democratic community life while hoping for a future opportunity, a possible “thaw,” within Russia.
What sets Russian HEPs in exile apart from similar initiatives from other countries is the nature of the regime they chose to resist. With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s regime has evolved into a qualitatively different system, one that is aggressively militarist as well as brutal in its response to any form of domestic dissent or disloyalty.
Resisting this regime requires rethinking the existing approaches to the defense of democratic institutions and values, including in the higher education sector. As the Kremlin consistently works to eliminate sources of independent knowledge and injects propaganda into all levels of education, the operation of educational initiatives based on democratic principles of free research and teaching is essential to the survival of a civic mindset in Russia, particularly among the younger generations.
Preserving independent educational initiatives outside of Russia is also critical to maintaining human capital that could revitalize the academic culture inside the country in any scenario of post-authoritarian transition. These external intellectual bases could also provide a platform to amplify critical voices inside the country and serve as a refuge or an exit option for those who take a principled stance in the domestic debate.
However, it is far from certain that Russian HEPs in exile will remain sufficiently resilient to perform such services. Many participating Russian scholars and educators have found themselves in situations of acute precarity, living in exile or remaining in Russia under conditions of fear and repression. Similarly, the projects cannot engage in long-term planning due to unstable finances and bureaucratic hurdles in the host countries.
The circumstances call for fresh approaches to ensure that civic educational resistance can succeed. The key vulnerabilities of these projects are in the intertwined domains of financial feasibility and security. New solutions to the problem of financing should take into account the fundamental conflict between transparency-based norms governing grantor-grantee relationships in democracies and the realities of the authoritarian regime in Russia, where the exposure of such relationships is likely to trigger domestic and transnational repression.
On the security front, digital privacy and global internet access have recently surfaced as major challenges for anyone living in Russia due to enhanced restrictions and blocking by the regime. Russian filtering and throttling efforts, online censorship, and extensive surveillance are now reshaping routine internet use. Supporting Russian online HEPs will therefore require investment in robust security protocols and novel methods to provide safe access.
Our data is predominantly drawn from 24 anonymized interviews with experts from the sector (7 interviews with HEPs, 4 interviews with RCs, 7 interviews with CEIs) and its principal donors (6 interviews). The interviews were conducted between February 2024 and February 2026. The research also relies on participant observation of Russian opposition events and seminars across Europe during this period. The interviewed experts represent primarily senior roles at the educational projects under study (chief executive or other senior positions).
Despite severe repression, Russian civil society groups remain a critical bastion for democracy.
Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a CEPA Russia Future Fellow, a researcher at the University of Lille, and an Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po, France. Her expertise covers identity-making in Eastern Europe and Russia, biopolitics, illiberalism, and memory. She served as a researcher in Europe and USA, including the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Polish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw, Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and others. She co-authored the Critical biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: from Population to Nation (Lexington, 2019), Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and co-edited New and Old Vocabularies of International Relations After the Ukraine Crisis (Routledge, 2016), Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance (Ibidem Verlag & Columbia University, 2018), and others.
Dr. Evgeny Roshchin leads the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of “Professorial Silence”, “Exit as Voice”, “Crime and Punishment in International Politics” and many other academic articles, and media commentaries.
The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian civil society organizations, HEPs in exile, and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. The authors also thank reviewers for providing some of the data used in this report. In addition, they would like to thank members of CEPA’s staff, including Michael Newton, David Kagan, Isabella Nieminen, and Polina Tsurikova.
CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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