27 Feb 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
“Dear Alexei, it’s been a year that darkness has fallen upon us – and yet, your ideas and your determination give us strength,” read a letter placed on opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s grave on 16 February 2025, marking the one-year anniversary of his death.
That day, more than 5,300 people attended the Borisovskoye Cemetery in Moscow where he is buried, according to the Beliy Schetchik (White Counter) movement. Despite temperatures reportedly dropping to a frosty -8 degrees Celsius, Navalny supporters waited in line outside the cemetery to pay their respects.
Artist and musician Yaroslav Smolev was one of the attendees. He told Index: “By joining in, not only did we get a chance to feel that we’re among like-minded people, but we also showed the [rest of the] Russian society what matters to us.”
In the days following Navalny’s death last year, Smolev spoke to Index for the first time. He had been arrested for staging a solo protest in support of the opposition leader in the centre of St Petersburg. Around that time, hundreds of mourners were being detained across the country, namely for laying flowers at improvised memorials.
Even so, people have returned to these locations this year to honour Navalny’s memory – and were predictably punished. According to the rights group OVD-Info, on the anniversary of Navalny’s death, at least 26 people were detained. In the city of Volgograd, for example, Alexander Yefimov from the Yabloko opposition party was jailed for 14 days for bringing flowers and a photo of Navalny to a memorial and placing them at a monument dedicated to victims of Soviet-era repression.
Carrying portraits of Putin’s main opponent – and even signs with his name on – became illegal after Navalny and his movement were declared “extremist” in 2021 and 2022.
For Smolev, Navalny is a role model who enabled him to overcome his fears. “He spoke with police officers in a natural and straightforward manner,” Smolev said. “There was not even a hint of fear in his behavior.” Smolev stressed that if it weren’t for Navalny, he would have never joined many peaceful protests, starting in 2017.
He added that if Navalny hadn’t gone as far as sacrificing his life “for his values and his ideals”, “the general public might not have realised that his lifelong battle was, in fact, heartfelt”. He was alluding to Navalny’s return to Russia in 2021 from Germany after recovering from a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
For Nadezhda Skochilenko – the mother of former Russian political prisoner and Index award winner Aleksandra Skochilenko – Navalny’s death caused “much pain”. Above all, she told Index, she thinks of him as “the son of his mother”, Lyudmila Navalnaya.
When Navalny died, Aleksandra was in jail. She had been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages. She was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange last summer.
Asked if the news of Navalny’s death increased her fear for the safety of political prisoners like her daughter, Nadezhda responded: “I’m too well-informed about what’s going on [in Russian] prisons. I’m frightened for everyone [who’s incarcerated] from the moment they’re arrested.”
She said that people die in jails, in pre-trial detention, and even during arrest. In 2024, eight political prisoners perished; one of them was pianist Pavel Kushnir, who spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Over the past year, the pressure on political prisoners has increased, Nadezhda said. They are placed in solitary confinement “more frequently and for longer periods of time”. In these tiny punishment cells, people are not allowed to lie down during the day, among other restrictions.
To make matters worse, in many cases, proper medical treatment is not provided to political prisoners – a fact that “the authorities no longer try to conceal”, Nadezhda said. She is also concerned that minors accused of “terrorism” in politically-motivated cases are placed in pre-trial detention, instead of on house arrest.
She added that “on a regular basis” dissidents are denied access to letters sent by their supporters. Nevertheless, people keep writing to them – “the most useful and safest act [of resistance] within reach of everyone”, according to Smolev.
Despite the pressure of the authorities, supporters and families of jailed dissidents battle with prison administrations over human rights abuses. They also attend court hearings when they can – while some are still open to the public, many political trials are now closed, especially the ones of dissidents charged with treason, Nadezhda explained.
But acts of resistance “cannot be entirely suppressed”, she said – “hence “[Putin’s] regime responds with even more severe crackdown on dissent”.
24 Feb 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine, United States
The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s propaganda machine.
Among these were that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, and that Zelenskyy’s approval rating in Ukraine has plummeted to 4%, all of which closely mirror the Kremlin’s narrative. In response, Zelenskyy said that the US president is “trapped” within a Russian “disinformation bubble”.
Trump’s comments have been debunked by many world leaders, including Keir Starmer, who immediately came out in support of Zelenskyy as a democratically elected leader, and asserted that it is normal for presidential elections to be suspended during wartime (as happened in the UK during World War Two).
This exchange indicates a drastic reshaping in the geopolitical relationship between the USA and Russia, and indeed the USA and its key allies – but it also indicates a worrying affront to access to truthful information, the normalisation of false realities, and an acceptance of the suppression of free speech.
In what is often deemed Putin’s “war on truth”, the autocratic leader’s regime is notorious for crackdowns on journalism and free information. As well as blocking access to almost all social media websites and international news sites in Russia, his government has banned independent news outlets, with media now under government control. In doing so, he has been able to control the narrative of the war for his own citizens.
This is not to say that Ukraine itself has been a bastion of free expression. As reported by Amnesty International, free speech restrictions in the country have increased since 2022, with 2,000 cases of individuals being charged, prosecuted or investigated for crimes such as “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine”, including those who class themselves as pacifists.
But what Trump’s words do signal is a terrifying new world order where intentional mistruths are prioritised over fair, free and accurate information, not only by dictators, but by leaders who are meant to be upholding the principles of democracy.
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, former US president Barack Obama delivered a speech at Stanford University about the growing propagation of disinformation, and how it could endanger democracy. Autocratic leaders, such as Putin, have weaponised the power of the internet to obfuscate the truth and confuse the global public, he said. “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Three years later, and we’re seeing this play out in real time, with the help of the current president of the USA. The sewage is spilling across the world, muddying the waters, and it will have global ramifications on what people believe to be undisputed fact.
18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
12 Feb 2025 | Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
When a dictator wants to publicly overcompensate for an election loss five years earlier, his ego must be very bruised. This is what happened in Belarus during the presidential “election” on 26 January 2025.
Belarusians still live in the reality of the fraudulent 2020 election when Russia-backed dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenka jailed or exiled his opponents, crushed mass pro-democracy protests, and launched a crackdown that has now been continuing for nearly five years.
Ahead of the 2020 election, hope was high as new politicians emerged, and informal polls on Telegram showed that 97% of people in Belarus wanted political change in the country, leaving Lukashenka with just 3% support. A meme was born: “Sasha 3%”. But his Central Election Committee “counted” 80% of votes for him, sparking mass protests and ongoing resistance.
Lukashenka waited nearly five years to respond to the meme that highlighted his woeful support. During his “re-election” on 26 January, he claimed that he received the support of 86.82% of voters. Conveniently, this was just under 1% lower than Putin had during his last elections in 2024 – so the dictatorial race remains friendly and, let’s say, respectful.
But jokes aside, no democratic country or institution could call it anything other than a sham election. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the president-elect of Belarus, told Index: “For the first time, the democratic world made statements of non-recognition of Belarus’s ‘election’ even before voting day. It’s clear that Lukashenka’s attempts to legitimise himself have failed. We can call it a self-reappointment, a farce, a circus – but not an election.”
The Belarusian dictator completely ignored all fundamental principles of free and fair elections. Moreover, he continues mass repression in the country every day. “The crackdown on the people only intensified ahead of the ‘election’,” said Tsikhanouskaya. “Lukashenka continues to behave as if hundreds of thousands are marching outside his palace, just like in 2020. But resistance against him is impossible in Belarus right now – you are immediately jailed and handed harsh sentences.”
This year’s election was an easy and relaxed “win” for Lukashenka, unlike in 2020 when he had to face public unrest and didn’t know how to respond – for example, to crowds of factory workers chanting “Lukashenka into prison van” or “Go away”.
One trick Lukashenka’s Central Election Commission has been using for decades is forcing people into early voting – changing the real ballots is easier this way rather than doing it on Sunday, the main election day. The Central Election Commision claimed that early voter turnout was a record 41% this time. Students and workers of the state sector are often persistently called and even brought in groups to do early voting. Independent observers often see this process as a tool to manipulate votes. Moreover, the human rights centre Viasna reported that at one polling station in the Ivatsevichy region in Southern Belarus, the commission members followed voters to booths and sometimes showed people where to mark the ballot for Lukashenka.
But another rigged election and the seventh term of the dictator doesn’t mean the fight is over. Belarusian activists, independent journalists, and exiled democratic forces refuse to let Lukashenka’s regime ignore the will of the people and silence their voices.
“For over four years, the people of Belarus have been showing the dictator that they want him gone,” said Tsikhanouskaya. “They see no future for the country with Lukashenka clinging to power. But their voices are silenced – it’s a situation where nine million people are held hostage. So our goal remains unchanged since August 2020: we keep working tirelessly for freedom and democracy in Belarus, the release of all political prisoners, and an end to violence and repression.”
While it is crucial for all Belarusians to have the support of the international community, the country’s free media are in special need of help and solidarity. Firstly, there are still many media workers inside the country who suffer severe repression from the regime.
There are many known names like Katsiaryna Bakhvalava (Andreyeva), a Belsat journalist who was sentenced to eight years and three months in prison; Ihar Losik, blogger and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalist, sentenced to 15 years; or Andrei Aliaksandraŭ, a BelaPAN journalist and former Index employee, sentenced to 14 years.
The independent organisation Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) counts 41 media workers as political prisoners currently. But the real numbers are higher, as many cases of repression are intentionally not made public.
BAJ deputy chairman Barys Haretski explains the pressure people face from the regime: “Repressions against journalists in Belarus remain at a high level. Many of those behind bars prefer not to be spoken about publicly to avoid even more severe persecution. During the elections, pressure on the media only intensified – entire editorial offices were shut down, such as Intex-Press in Baranavichy, where the entire team ended up in pre-trial detention on criminal charges.
“The situation for journalists in the country remains critical. The authorities preemptively wiped out independent media even before the elections, and many media professionals who stayed in Belarus had to endure constant searches and detentions.”
Many independent media managed to leave the country and relaunch their work in exile in Lithuania and Poland, as the crackdown against civil society in Belarus aimed to decimate the whole field of those not controlled by the state. Having colleagues held hostage in Belarusian prisons, whilst trying to establish work in a new country and constantly fighting for the right of Belarusians to receive true and accurate news creates a very challenging environment.
Following the election, the situation became even more challenging for Belarusian free media. But this crisis came from an unexpected direction – the decision of newly-elected USA President Donald Trump to freeze foreign aid last month.
The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the 90-day freeze on funding for overseas aid projects, meant that many Belarusian exiled journalists, media workers, and NGOs face an uncertain future. This directly affects all Belarusians, as well as journalists.
“The organisations that had USA support were often well-established, producing high-quality media content with significant reach inside Belarus,” said the Belarusian Association of Journalists’s Haretski. “ Many of them are now on the verge of shutting down but in the Belarusian media sector, we are used to crisis situations. And BAJ is engaged in a very large number of products, projects, and support for the media sector as a whole. This includes everything from psychological support to fact-checking and education”.
Often, Belarusian media in exile are the only ones able to provide balance against the state propaganda machine of Lukashenka. People inside the country continue secretly reading these media outlets using virtual private network (VPN) services, despite these being blocked and labelled extremist in Belarus, with criminal penalties for following their websites and social media.
“Belarusian independent media maintain a huge audience within the country – around three million people, or even more,” added Haretski. “Despite forced migration, blockages, and the criminalisation of media consumption, their influence remains significant.
“Losing this influence would mean handing the audience over to state-run Belarusian and Russian propaganda, which are eager to fill this vacuum. This would also affect attitudes towards the war in Ukraine – without independent information, propaganda would quickly brainwash the population, making Belarus a more loyal ally of Putin. So far, this hasn’t happened, largely thanks to the work of independent media.”
