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
22 Jan 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, Features, Russia, 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.
It’s something of a surprise to learn that the rap music genre in Russia dates as far back as the Soviet era – and that then, it came about thanks to a woman, Olga Opryatnaya. Second director of the Moscow Rock Club, sometime in the mid-1980s she heard a performance by the group Chas Pik. Struck by their innovative funk-rock fusion overlaid with an MC’s flow, Opryatnaya invited them to record an album. And thus, Russian rap was born.
Today, Russian rap music made by women coalesces around Zhenski rap, a sub-genre that emerged in the mid-1990s. Starting with Lika Rap, the 1994 album by Lika Pavlova (aka Lika Star), women have “represented” in what remains in Russia – as elsewhere – a male-dominated genre.
But this has not been a smooth ride. And as the curious case of Instasamka, the first female rapper to be subjected to state censorship shows, double standards abound – with women being targeted, unlike their male counterparts, with ambiguous charges of “moral inappropriateness”.
The censorship of women musicians in Russia is not, it should be said, a recent phenomenon. Pussy Riot, the feminist political collective, have been persecuted for more than ten years, with five of their exiled members sentenced in absentia in September 2025 to long jail sentences for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. But their cause went largely unnoticed within Russia’s rap community.
Now the war between Instasamka and the authorities, beginning in late 2021, has added cultural censorship to the well-established category of suppressing political speech.
A vlogger and social media personality before becoming a musician, Instasamka’s older Instagram posts give a good sense of her defining aesthetic – accentuated physical features interspersed with tattoos, tropes often featured by her counterparts in the USA. Rubbing against the conservative – anti-foreign – values that have been in ascendency in Russia in recent years, it was no surprise that she would, in due course, attract the wrong sort of attention.
The offensive against Instasamka (real name Darya Zoteeva) was initially led by state organisations and civic organisations on 24 November 2021. The Rospotrebnadzor, the Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, cancelled her concert after complaints from members of the Surgut city Duma in Khanty-Mansia. The day after, the media watchdog Roskomnadzor cancelled her concert in Sverdlovsk due to similar complaints from local officials. The censorship campaign against her picked up, though, after being taken up by conservative parental groups like Fathers of Russia. A concerted campaign accusing her of promoting debauchery and prostitution among children starting in December 2022 led, ultimately, to the cancellation of her February 2023 tour.
Wilting under the pressure, Instasamka temporarily relocated to the United Arab Emirates, albeit in a precarious financial position – her bank account had been frozen by the Ministry of Internal Affairs due to an investigation on charges of tax evasion and money laundering.
The fraught situation that Instasamka found herself in only began to unwind in the late spring of 2023, following a meeting between her and Katerina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League. At the meeting, Instasamka and Hoffmannita (a fellow female rapper similarly targeted by conservative pressure groups) publicly apologised to concerned parents, and undertook to reform their public personas.
Her travails were far from over, however. Instasamka’s unapologetic pop (read: commercial) sensibilities had always set her out on a limb. In a music form that has traditionally (if not always consistently) prided itself on social awareness and political literacy, Instasamka’s peers themselves labelled her with one damning word: inauthenticity. By late 2023, the perception of Instasamka in Russia’s rap community was one of vocal disgust rather than silent tolerance, “I forbade my children from listening to Instasamka,” Levan Gorozia from rap group L’One told Index. “They need to understand what’s good and what’s bad.”
Similarly award-winning, rapper Ira PSP noted: “I haven’t heard of such names. They’re probably pop projects; all the rappers know each other.” Kima, another well-known rapper in the community, explicitly questioned the artistic credentials of her “peer”. Instasamka, she said, “is a successful commercial project. She’s great at copying Western artists. I don’t think of her as a rapper. […] A girl who raps can call herself whatever she wants, but she’s not a rapper if someone writes lyrics for her. I haven’t heard decent female rap lately that has both substance and a decent flow.”
But there is, perhaps, another dimension to Instasamka’s support – or lack of therein – within Russia’s female rap community.
As one member of rap group Osnova Pashasse – one of the oldest all-female rap groups in Russia – pointed out (anonymously but speaking for the group), the issue goes far deeper. “In our country, many still don’t take rap with a female voice seriously,” she said. “Perhaps this is the fault of the female MCs themselves who don’t focus their work on something interesting, with intellectual or spiritual themes, or even some captivating abstraction in their lyrics, but instead constantly emphasise their gender in their lyrics and sometimes try to compete with men.”
Credibility for female rappers, it seems, does not sit easily with commercial kudos. But then again, even commercial success is predicated on staying with the boundaries of social and cultural norms – which, in effect, sometimes operate as a form of artistic censorship.
***
The success of female rappers in Russia is, by and large, contingent upon the approval of a male-dominated culture and male-dominated ideas of quality. The historical antecedents of female rappers working in the genre notwithstanding, fair evaluation of their capabilities is not a given. As branding expert Nikolas Koro noted, a small fan base has a marked limiting impact on the visibility and commercial viability of female rappers. “In financial terms, the number of female rap fans is mere pennies. So, the fate of almost all women rappers in Russia is either to leave the stage … or change the musical format.”
Ira PSP expressed the challenges trenchantly. The issue, she said, is that “we are neither heard nor seen. The girls and I have dedicated our lives to culture, but there is no [financial] return.”
So, where is Zhenski rap heading? The balance that its practitioners must try to strike can be found somewhere between the desire to be seen as “authentic” (legitimate in the eyes of the rap community) and being themselves. They must appeal to both the dominant cultural norms within rap and assert their individuality, as women and as rappers. In the 2000s, this meant balancing skill, sex-appeal, and objectification, which only become more pronounced from the 2010s on. And they, of course, must take into account the very real prospect of censorship – creative or cultural, by peers or by the state.
The Instasamka saga did not end with her apology of 2023. After another scheduled tour was cancelled in 2024, on the grounds of her “provocative appearance”, Instasamka finally threw in the towel, declaring that she would rebrand herself and embrace a more socially acceptable demeanour. This she has played out by re-inventing herself as a champion of child safety – and by showing rather less cleavage on Instagram. In July 2025, she participated in a roundtable discussion on a proposed legislative initiative to limit the access of minors to blogging platforms. Instasamka has shifted her entire public persona behind vocally supporting a “pro-child” agenda – completely distancing herself from her past in the process.
She has also, it seems, changed her views about artistic censorship. In July this year, she openly criticised fellow rappers Dora and Maybe Baby for allegedly “anti-Russian” behaviour. Their transgression, in Instasamka’s opinion? Performing covers of songs from firebrands like the rapper FACE. Real name Ivan Dryomin, FACE was a vocal critic of the Putin regime. Forced out of the country, he was labelled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government in 2022.
8 Jan 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom
Marie Colvin, Pierre Zakrzewski, Simon Cumbers – just a few of the journalists killed whilst reporting from some of the most dangerous places on earth.
Between 2000 and 2022, 16 UK journalists were killed while reporting from warzones, and a new campaign is set to honour these newsgatherers with both a physical and digital monument.
The campaign, titled On the Record, is running a competition to decide on the design of the monument, with entries open until 9 January. Judging will take place in March and a planned unveiling during spring 2027.
The National Memorial Arboretum, which describes itself as “the UK’s year-round centre of remembrance” is set to host the memorial, alongside existing pieces dedicated to the armed services.
Sarah Sands, former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and Chair of Trustees for the campaign, stressed the importance of the journalist as a physical witness during conflicts.
She said: “Their role in testimony and truth-telling seems incredibly important at the moment… the sense of someone who’s there, for no other reason than to observe and tell and bring back the truth and let the world know what’s happening.”
Among the other trustees is former BBC foreign editor Jon Williams, executive director of the Rory Peck Trust, a charity providing support to freelance journalists and which was set up following the 1993 death of freelance cameraman Rory Peck.
Discussing the importance of the proposed monument, Williams said: “The sacrifices that people make in service of finding out the facts and verifying the truth is a public service that all of us should be grateful for and those who pay the ultimate price deserve to be remembered.”
“More journalists have been killed in 2025 than at any time in history of journalism, and so it’s not as if the problem is going away. If anything, it’s getting worse.”
The CPJ reported 127 journalists and media workers killed globally last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024.
Williams went on to say: “It’s about remembering the collective endeavour of journalism and the importance of eyewitness reporting. And the best way to do that is to salute those who’ve lost their lives in the service of the truth.”
Williams talked about his connection to photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed whilst covering the Libyan civil war in 2011: “He was a little bit younger than me, but we’ve grown up pretty close to each other, just north of Liverpool. And in fact, when I took Mark Thompson to Libya in the autumn of 2011 we went to Misrata and laid some flowers at the site where Tim had been killed.”
Index on Censorship works closely with the Tim Hetherington Trust as well as Liverpool John Moores University to provide a fellowship to a freshly graduated journalist each year.
The physical monument will not include names, however an online digital tribute, which Williams described as a “living memorial”, will include names as well as contributions from family and colleagues.
Williams said: “Nobody should have to die in the service of the truth alone, and we try to ensure that nobody does.”
Karola Zakrzewska got involved with the campaign after her brother Pierre was killed whilst reporting for Fox News in Ukraine. She said: “Just before he died, we were talking to him, and were saying, ‘It’s getting a bit dangerous now.’
“He said: ‘No, I’ve got to stay. I’ve got to stay to tell people what Putin’s doing.’”
She described how war journalists like her brother want to keep reporting because they have to continue to tell the stories.
“They have to put themselves, unfortunately, at risk to be able to bring us the stories back as we watch it on our very comfortable sofas, in our very comfortable lives,” she said.
“But without them, we wouldn’t know what was happening. It’s incredibly important that we just spend a minute as we walk past and remember them, or just take a couple of minutes thinking about why they’re the guys who tell us what’s happening in the world.”
The project aims to raise £1 million, with half going to the monument itself and the rest to its upkeep. Already having received pledges by organisations such as Bloomberg and News UK, according to Sands, the campaign is still seeking donors.
The On the Record website can be found here.
