About Meduza
Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian media outlet. Completely outlawed by the Russian state, we operate from abroad to deliver news that censors can’t stop to millions of readers inside Russia and around the globe. You can read our reporting in both Russian and English.
For our international audience, Meduza in English offers a curated window into Russia, Ukraine, and the wider region. Every day, we publish the latest news, feature stories, and analysis from some of Russia’s top reporters and experts, including journalists working on the ground.
Meduza also publishes books — specifically, those the Kremlin has banned. We ship printed editions globally, while our mobile app delivers these forbidden titles to readers behind Russia’s digital curtain, free of charge.
Read Meduza’s code of conduct here.
Our story
In 2014, a team of independent journalists left Russia to escape official pressure and censorship. Our co-founder, Galina Timchenko, had been fired from Lenta.ru at the Kremlin’s demand, at the height of the annexation of Crimea. Almost the entire newsroom quit in protest. With these journalists, she launched Meduza from Riga, beyond the reach of Vladimir Putin’s expanding police state.
From Europe, we built a newsroom that earned the trust of millions in Russia. For years, Meduza delivered independent reporting at a standard that had become impossible for news organizations based in the country. But the Kremlin’s assault on the free press only accelerated. In April 2021, the Justice Ministry branded us “foreign agents,” effectively strangling our ad revenue. We managed to pivot successfully to crowdfunded journalism, which the Kremlin choked off in January 2023 by designating Meduza itself as an “undesirable organization,” making it a crime in Russia to support our work.
In the meantime, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a wartime crackdown on dissent. Having vehemently condemned the war, we were forced to evacuate all of our staff. Since then, the Russian authorities have blocked our website and we have faced constant DDoS attacks. In 2023, Timchenko became the first Russian journalist to have her phone infected with Pegasus spyware. In 2024–2025, Russian prosecutors began launching criminal cases against Meduza’s leadership and journalists.
Despite state pressure, we continue to produce reporting from inside Russia thanks to our network of anonymous “guerilla reporters” and sources on the ground. For millions of readers in the country, Meduza has become an essential civic institution that not only keeps them informed but offers vital support in navigating an increasingly polarized world.
The Kremlin has made it a crime for our core audience to support us, but Meduza has survived thanks to the backing of dedicated readers around the world. Click here to set up your recurring donation to Meduza today.
Impact and Recognition
Meduza doesn’t just report news; we build the tools to bypass Russia’s police state. By engineering ways around the Kremlin’s Internet censorship — such as our mobile app that works in Russia without a VPN, regularly updated mirror sites, “magic” redirect links, and downloadable PDFs for offline sharing — we ensure millions have access to independent reporting from both sides of the border. Meduza is a crucial bridge, keeping Russians inside and outside the country in a single, shared reality, and combating polarization.
Every month, we reach more than 13 million people, including at least 8 million readers inside Russia. Our newsroom works across platforms, publishing on Telegram, YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram. While our readers in Russia cannot donate to Meduza safely, we’re proud to say that more than 12,000 monthly donors from all over the world support our work.
Meduza also publishes both fiction and non-fiction books that are banned in Russia. These titles help make sense of our rapidly changing world and give readers something to hold on to in dark and difficult times. Since 2023, we’ve released 24 books in print, which have sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide. Digital editions are available to readers inside Russia free of charge via our mobile app. These include works by both Russian and international authors, such as Jonathan Littell, Simon Shuster, Mikhail Zygar, Anton Dolin and Elena Kostyuchenko. We’re especially proud to have worked with Ukrainian authors and creators and to have published books by film director and producer Alexander Rodnyansky, writer Zhenia Berezhna, journalist Mikhail Durnev, as well as to have released the first Ukrainian-language edition of Dima Zicer’s book Love in Times of Turbulence. You can find more information about all of Meduza’s books here.
Meduza’s impact also extends to charity and cultural initiatives. We run the Let’s Help campaign, which raises money for Ukrainian humanitarian organizations and civilians affected by Russia’s war. And we work with the You Are Not Alone campaign to raise funds to support political prisoners in Russia.
In 2025, Meduza curated and organized the “No” exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, bringing together artists and journalists to reflect on the past decade and our broken world. Participating artists included Stine Marie Jacobsen, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, SUPERFLEX, Cristina Lucas, Pilvi Takala and others. Over three months, the exhibition and its accompanying public program were attended by more than 13,000 visitors.
Since its founding, Meduza has received a steady stream of major journalism awards. In 2015, co-founder Galina Timchenko received the Fritt Ord Foundation’s Free Media Award for her personal contribution to independent journalism. In 2018, Shura Burtin won the True Story Award grand prize for his profile of imprisoned Chechen human rights activist Oyub Titiyev, first published in Russian by Meduza. In 2021, Meduza reporter Denis Dmitriev won the European Press Prize for investigative reporting on elite financial networks.
The year 2022 marked a cluster of international recognitions: Meduza itself received the Fritt Ord Foundation Prize, Galina Timchenko was named European Journalist of the Year by Prix Europa, Meduza won a Special Prize from the Franco-German Journalism Prize, and Timchenko also received the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2023, Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova was awarded a True Story Award for the joint investigation into war crimes against civilians committed by Russian soldiers in a village near Kyiv, documenting sexual violence against women and the killing of local men. In December 2025, Yapparova was selected for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship by the International Women’s Media Foundation, further underscoring Meduza’s sustained international recognition for investigative and public-interest journalism.
Meduza’s staff have also won the Redkollegia, a prestigious, independent Russian media prize for high-quality journalism, over 40 times — more than any other news outlet.
Our Team
Meduza remains the most persecuted media organization in Russia, where many of our journalists have family. For security reasons, we withhold the identities of our staff, apart from Meduza’s founders and the English-language team editor listed below.
CEO
Galina Timchenko
Editor-in-Chief
Ivan Kolpakov
Managing Editor
Kevin Rothrock
Contact us
To get in touch with the Meduza in English team, contact: [email protected]
For inquiries about collaborations or using Meduza’s content, contact: [email protected]
For inquiries about subscriptions and all questions about donations, contact: [email protected]
For all questions about books, contact: [email protected]
Rules for using our content
All materials published by Meduza belong to Meduza. You cannot republish our content without prior approval from our newsroom. All questions and requests regarding the use of our materials should be addressed to [email protected].
Meduza regularly releases its content under a Creative Commons CC BY license. This means you can republish these select materials without prior approval from Meduza‘s newsroom, though you must identify the author (s) and source. Please note that this license does not apply to photographs. Our coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is currently accessible under this license.
Other formalities
We are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. Every story at Meduza is reported and written by a journalist. To translate our work into English, we use an AI model configured to adhere to our strict editorial standards. This process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
The rights to images displayed on Meduza belong to the copyright holders indicated below all photographs.
SIA “Medusa Project”
Media registration certificate number: 000740272 (September 4, 2014)
Terbatas iela 14-3, Riga, LV-1011