17 Feb 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, Features, Ukraine, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025.
For Ukraine’s Gen Z, the war has created two kinds of silence: one under sirens and the other under guilt.
Those who stayed live through air raid alerts and numb routine; those who left watch from abroad – scrolling through updates, unsure what to say to the people they love back home. Both carry their version of survival, and both are having to learn to speak to each other again.
In Dnipro, Dasha Buldenko, 19, says she has grown used to fear.
“You get used to the sirens, you get used to the explosions. You stop feeling anything,” she tells me. “We live in totally different worlds now.”
For her, life has narrowed to a quiet persistence: staying, coping and enduring without expecting understanding from those who left Ukraine.
“People who moved abroad forget where they came from,” she says, frustrated by what she calls the “pity” tone of returning friends.
“They see a different world, different opportunities. We don’t have those because of war.”
Mark Neshta, a 21-year-old student at the University of Essex in the UK, describes another kind of distance: the one between empathy and experience.
“You just can’t truly understand how it feels,” he admits. “At the beginning, I was deeply depressed that my country was going through such horror while I was sitting safely 1,000km away.”
He calls it “a strange cognitive dissonance” when “you’re physically abroad but all you care about, all you live by, is news from Ukraine. You consume it only through the internet or through conversations with loved ones who stayed”.
Over time, that guilt has turned into a determination to define himself more clearly. Living abroad, he says, has made him think about what it means to represent Ukraine.
“When people ask where I’m from, I want them to see more than war, to see culture, history, identity.”
He even switched to speaking Ukrainian, though he grew up speaking Russian. “I don’t think living abroad is what caused that,” he says. “It was the war itself.”
Both voices show the same wound from opposite sides.
Those inside Ukraine hide their pain behind fatigue. Those outside hide their guilt behind activism or composure. When they talk, it is not politics that divides them but the need to censor emotion, to sound strong, to sound grateful, to avoid hurting each other with what the other cannot understand.
What does that do to identity? For Dasha, being Ukrainian “just is”.
She says: “We are all Ukrainians; we stand for our own, regardless of language barriers.”
For her, it is a fact of staying and surviving. For Mark, it is something to articulate and explain. One holds on by living it, the other by translating it.
In the end, both sides are searching for the same thing: to be understood.
“People just need to actually listen to each other,” Dasha says.
10 Feb 2026 | Asia and Pacific, China, Digital rights, Europe and Central Asia, News, Russia
To mark World Privacy Day this year (28 January 2026), Index on Censorship invited extraordinary human rights activists to share their experiences of the importance of encrypted apps at an event sponsored by former cabinet minister Louise Haigh MP. A number of members of parliament took part in the discussion. Among the speakers were Uyghur activist Rahima Mahmut and ex-Pussy Riot member Olga Borisova. They both told us why encryption is not a nice-to-have. It is essential to their lives and work.
End-to-end encryption has been designated a risk factor by Ofcom as part of their role in implementing the Online Safety Act. This means pressure could seriously mount to create a “backdoor” to the apps that have encryption as their central feature. This would be a disaster for our privacy and one we won’t stand for. We’ve written about the many reasons this is a terrible path to walk here. And so long as the future of encryption remains precarious in the UK, we will continue to make noise. As these women told us powerfully at the event, there is so much at stake if end-to-end encryption is broken.
Below we share the speeches delivered by Mahmut and Borisova. Both act as powerful reminders of the extreme costs incurred when privacy is laid to waste.
Rahima Mahmut, Uyghur human rights activist and director of Stop Uyghur Genocide
As a Uyghur, when I hear the words “online safety” I do not hear reassurance.
I hear a warning.
I come from a community where the language of “safety” was used to justify one of the most extensive systems of digital surveillance the world has ever seen. In China, the government claimed it was keeping people safe, while it monitored every message, every contact, every digital footprint of Uyghur lives. People disappeared not because they committed crimes, but because of what they searched, shared or said online.
That is why I am deeply concerned by the Online Safety Act.
I understand its intention. Protecting children and preventing harm matters. But intention is not enough. We must look at how power operates once it is written into law.
When governments pressure platforms to remove vaguely defined “harmful” content, the result is not safety – it is pre-emptive censorship. Platforms will always choose caution over justice. They will silence first and ask questions later.
For Uyghurs in exile, digital platforms are not a luxury. They are our lifeline.
They are how we document atrocities, speak to journalists, warn the world and preserve our culture.
When content is removed, when accounts are suspended, when voices are quietly buried by algorithms, the cost is not abstract. It is human.
I have seen where this road leads. In China, online control did not stop at content moderation. It led to mass surveillance, collective punishment and genocide.
The UK must not – even unintentionally – normalise the logic that safety requires less freedom, less privacy and more state control.
True online safety does not come from expanding surveillance powers. It comes from protecting rights, enforcing transparency and defending the most vulnerable voices – not silencing them.
As someone who has lived the consequences of digital authoritarianism, I urge you: do not build a system that future governments could abuse. Do not trade freedom for a false sense of security. Because once lost, our voices are very hard to recover.
Olga Borisova, former member of Pussy Riot and Russian human rights activist
For people like me, online safety is not an abstract concept. It is directly connected to physical safety and survival.
I now live in the UK, but my work and many of the people I communicate with are still connected to Russia and Belarus – countries where surveillance is routine and political repression is part of everyday life.
I have been sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in Russia for my anti-war stance and support for Ukraine. I am on a federal wanted list and cannot travel to half of the countries in the world. Because of this, I have no choice but to think carefully about the security of my communications every single day.
For activists, journalists and human rights defenders, encrypted communication is not about hiding, it is about preventing state surveillance. It is about making sure that conversations cannot be intercepted, taken out of context or used as evidence.
One of the tools I rely on in my work is Signal. I use it precisely because neither the company nor any government can read the messages. That is the whole point of the technology.
Signal helps Russian human rights workers and other people to flee persecution in Russia and avoid being sent to the war.
Russia already banned calls in WhatsApp and Telegram. And sending information from Russia abroad can be considered a high treason.
Signal is just an example, but it is considered the most secure way to communicate.
In fact, encryption helps save lives. Encryption helps provide the truth.
If the Online Safety Act forces companies to scan private messages or weaken encryption, services like Signal may simply stop operating in the UK. If that happens, the impact will be very real. Human rights defenders based here will lose one of the few secure ways they have to communicate with people living under authoritarian surveillance.
The UK is home to many exiled activists and journalists like me. If secure tools disappear here, the UK becomes a less safe place to do human rights work, not by intention, but by technical design.
There is also a security issue. Russia actively uses cyber operations and state-linked hackers as part of hybrid warfare, and the UK itself has been a target. Weakening encryption does not make societies safer, it creates vulnerabilities that hostile actors know how to exploit.
I recognise that serious crimes, including child sexual exploitation, do take place in private and encrypted messaging spaces. But the evidence also shows that these crimes are addressed through targeted investigations, intelligence-led operations and lawful hacking, not through blanket access to everyone’s private communications.
That is why I believe the Online Safety Act should be amended to draw a clear and explicit line: end-to-end encrypted private messaging must not be subject to scanning requirements or technical backdoors. Instead, the focus should remain on proportionate, targeted enforcement against suspects, while preserving strong encryption as a core part of public safety, digital resilience and democratic infrastructure.
This approach protects children and the public without exposing journalists, activists, victims of abuse and people targeted by hostile states to new and irreversible risks.
27 Jan 2026 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News, Switzerland, United States
The reverberations of Donald Trump’s incendiary speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos are still being felt, despite the US President’s retreat on the hostile purchase of Greenland and the role of British troops in Afghanistan. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made the point in his own Davos speech last week that “the old order is not coming back.” He added: “We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
Through all the bombast and narcissism of Trump’s words ran a thread of cold reality. As the Yale Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad wrote in the Financial Times at the weekend, Atlanticism as we know it is over and a new multipolar age is upon us. “The global system no longer has one centre. It has many, each of which will seek to project power in whatever way serves its interests”.
It has often been said of authoritarian leaders that we should listen carefully to what they say they plan to do, however wayward or capricious, to best prepare for what is to come. The worst of Trumpian expansionism may have been averted for the time being, but the US President has made his imperial intentions for Greenland plain since his first term in office. His views on Nato have been equally clear from the outset.
The same is true for Trump’s views on free and independent journalism, which he despises. We’ve been writing about Trump’s threats to media freedom at Index since the beginning of his first term in office in 2017, but those concerned about media freedom and censorship in the US and the rest of the world would do well to go back and examine the section of the Davos speech where Trump talked about Ukraine. As is the case with many of his platform utterances, it is not always evident which parts are scripted, and which improvised. But about halfway through, the US President shifted from criticism of Nato to a discussion of Ukraine and revisited his well-worn contention that Russia would never have invaded in 2021 if he had still been in office.
The words are not entirely coherent, but the message is clear enough: “It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 US presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election. Can’t have rigged elections.”
He then outlined what amounts to his political doctrine: “You need strong borders, strong elections, and ideally a good press. I always say it – strong borders, strong elections, free, fair elections, and a fair media”.
The repetition for rhetorical emphasis is interesting, but so are some key omissions. Trump wants strong borders (he says it twice), and admits the need for free and fair, as well as strong elections (again he says this twice). But he can’t bring himself to use the words “strong” or “free” to describe the media. Instead, he merely wants a “good” press and a “fair media”.
In case anyone was in any doubt about what he meant by this, he went on to elaborate:
“The media is terrible. It’s very crooked. It’s very biased, terrible, but someday it’ll straighten out, because it’s losing all credibility. Think of it, when I went in, a landslide, a giant landslide – won all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything – and I only get negative press. That means that it has no credibility. And if they’re going to get credibility, they’re going to have to be fair. So, you need a fair press, but you also need those other elements, and I inherited a terrible, terrible situation.”
At this point, Trump returned to discuss geopolitics and his close relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But it’s too late. The authoritarian cat is out of the bag. The logic goes like this. Trump is the greatest president since George Washington. He won a landslide election, turned around the American economy, stopped migration and ended eight foreign conflicts. And yet, the media continued to criticise him. How can this be?
The words at the heart of the Davos speech are genuinely chilling for the future of the American media and worth repeating: “I only get negative press. That means that it has no credibility. And if they’re going to get credibility, they’re going to have to be fair.”
It is no surprise that the American networks now operate with extreme caution in the face of threats to remove their licences. Strict control of access to the White House and the Pentagon has led to further timidity among the press corps, while Trump’s deep pockets and mania for defamation suits have extended the chilling effect to every newsroom in the country.
But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the events of the past week, it is TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). When European powers stood up for themselves and each other, Trump backed down. The American media should take a leaf out of their book.
27 Jan 2026 | Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News
The final month of 2025 brought many Belarusians a rare feeling of joy and hope when 123 Belarusian political prisoners were released from jail under the terms of agreements reached between the USA and the president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The USA’s special envoy for Belarus, John Cole, also announced that further releases could be expected in the future. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this event for those who were allowed to go free and for their families. No one who has seen a political prison from the inside or even at close quarters could ever take a casual attitude to such news.
But the inherent logic of releases like this merits a separate discussion. The releases do not take place as a result of judicial review or acknowledgement of the injustice of prisoners’ sentences, and they do not represent the beginning of systemic change. For Lukashenka, the freedom of his country’s finest people – journalists, activists and human rights advocates – is a bargaining chip for getting sanctions against Belarusian companies lifted.
This is a long-established mechanism, involving dozens of consultants, employees of the administration and members of the security services. There are behind-the-scenes agreements and constant work on lists, in which some people’s names are crossed out and others rise higher in the queue to freedom.
Today is the birthday of Belarusian journalist Andrei Aliaksandraŭ. This is the fifth year he has celebrated his birthday in prison. Today he turns 48.
In 2020, following yet another falsified presidential election, hundreds of thousands of people throughout Belarus came out into the streets to peacefully demand honest elections. Lukashenka ordered the protest to be crushed. As the whole world watched, the attempted revolution ended with people being arrested en masse, savagely beaten, tortured and even killed.
Belarus is one of the top five countries with the greatest number of arrested journalists, ahead of Russia. Andrei was one of those who ensured the protesters were heard, helped arrested people access legal assistance, find lawyers, pay their fines and legal costs. Three years ago, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison on a charge of high treason.
Andrei is remembered in the UK. Not long before his arrest he was awarded a prestigious international grant and spent a year in London, working with organisations active in the areas of human rights and freedom of speech, including Index on Censorship and Article 19. He shared his experience of what pressure on the media looks like from the inside and its consequences for society.
His former colleagues have fond memories of him. “Keen to learn and receptive”, “a huge Liverpool fan”, “he really loved Belarus”, “great fun!” The news of his arrest came as a terrible shock to them, since Belarus, the country where he was arrested, is the last one in Europe that still applies the death penalty. Including for high treason.
Charging journalists under the criminal code’s article on high treason ceased to be an exception long ago. It has become one instrument among others which is used regularly to apply pressure on media workers. The article defines the grounds for charges hazily, allowing the authorities wide scope for interpretation, it allows trials to be held behind closed doors and cruel punishments to be applied, up to and including life imprisonment. And it simultaneously serves a stigmatising function by depriving an individual of moral legitimacy in the eyes of one sector of society. In this way, the accused or convicted individual is categorised as a “traitor” or a “spy”. An old, familiar, Soviet move.
For me this story also has a personal dimension. In my childhood I spent every summer at my grandmother’s apartment in the small, provincial Belarusian town of Novopolotsk, in the Vitebsk region. In that place, I was a very happy child. I remember the squeaking swings in the yard, grazed knees, ice cream, my friends, my bicycle, taking the asters which grew in the garden back to town from our dacha. For me, that place became a synonym for carefree happiness.
Many years later, I would receive my own political sentence in Russia. Eight years, for a song against the war in Ukraine. In that same year, I would hear Andrei’s story. And learn that he was serving his sentence in Novopolotsk. I would read that human rights advocates referred to his correctional colony as a concentration camp surrounded by oil processing plants. That, in addition to performing slave labour, the political prisoners are constantly confined in punitive isolation cells, that the inmates of this colony are beaten and tortured. That they are forbidden to wear glasses or use a walking-stick, that if an inmate suffers a broken bone or other serious injury, even as a result of torture, the chances of medical assistance are minimal. The wound is bandaged up and the inmate is sent back to the barracks, or an isolation cell, so that no one can see his condition. That men there commit suicide and die from neglected illnesses.
Andrei Aliaksandraŭ is in that colony at this very moment. I open Google Maps. From my grandmother’s old apartment to Correctional Colony No. 1 it is 13 minutes by car.
In that place Andrei wrote this poem, which his colleagues at Index helped to translate from Belarusian to English
When you look out through the bars at the sky,
It’s not bars you see but the sky overhead.
Yesterday’s bread smells of mould and loss,
but tomorrow’s smells like genuine bread.
You say: the sky is a trick of the light.
But the bars are the trick of the light, I say!
Because bars are a hashtag, just a habit, right?
And this is the hashtag trending today.
Yet the sky cares nothing for hashtags at all,
the sky has no thought for trends up ahead,
it does not feel the ground where our feet fall,
nor count the centuries and slices of bread.
The sky just draws clouds of cotton wool
over time – this is all that goes on really.
And the sky does not see any bars at all
when it peers deep into the sky in me.
The question that inevitably arises against the backdrop of the recent releases is: Why is Andrei Aliaksandraŭ still in jail?
Generally speaking, in such cases the answer does not lie in the details of specific negotiations, but in the logic of the authoritarian system. People who create broad connections, help others and strengthen independent professional communities, constitute a long-term threat to the regime. Their release does not yield any immediate political advantage and does not weaken the actual infrastructure of resistance. In this sense, the selective releases are not a step towards freedom, but a means of maintaining control by demonstrating a managed “humane” approach. However, as a humanist, I always greet news of the release of hostages with joy.
Having spoken with people who worked with him for a while in Britain, as I examine his photographs, I see before me a cheerful romantic, an individual who, in a situation of danger to himself, was not afraid to do the right thing, an individual who has paid for this choice with his own freedom and his own health. I am filled with admiration for him and want to do everything I possibly can to hasten his release.
Andrei’s story is only one out of thousands, but it clearly demonstrates that in today’s Belarus, people are not punished for their crimes, but for their profession and their solidarity. By definition, a journalist cannot be a “traitor”.
I believe that Andrei must spend his next birthday at liberty, continuing to pursue his profession, for a journalist’s work consists in shining light into those places where it is easy for evil to hide without it.
Translation by Andrew Bromfield
Read letters from other prioners of Lukashenka’s regime
