EU Offers Financial Help for Displaced Russian, Belorussian Journalists

Ukrainska Pravda on Monday wrote that the European Commission would provide almost €3 million in aid to independent journalists exiled from Russia and Belarus who have found shelter in the European Union and have continued their reporting from there.

Brussels announced that those funds will go toward supporting independent media and journalists from Belarus and Russia working in EU countries, enabling them to continue producing and distributing content to their audiences without “editorial interference.”

The Ukrainian news agency went on to report that the funds will also be used to create a pan-European platform or network of media centers to promote independent journalism: Up until March 14, non-governmental organizations and research centers can apply for support for journalists.

“Russian independent media and civil society play a vital role in ensuring the continued flow of information to Russian audiences, in and outside Russia,” the EC wrote.

In 2022, Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin made it a crime for journalists to describe his full-scale invasion of Ukraine as anything other than a “special military operation.”

In 2023 alone, 34 journalists were detained and 29 remained in prison until at least the end of that year.

Among those were Evan Gershkovich, an American citizen and Wall Street Journal reporter who in March of 2023 was detained by Russian authorities on trumped-up espionage charges while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg. The US State Department determined his arrest to be a “wrongful detention,” but on July 19, 2023, he was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony. 

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Armen Sarkisyan was on Ukraine’s wanted list as one of the organizers of the Maidan killings in February 2014. He appears to have been targeted along with two others linked to Yanukovych.

Last August he was returned to the United States as part of what his backers called “the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.”

Another highly publicized case in the US was that of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, who was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for spreading “false information about the Russian army.” Kurmasheva’s sentence was handed down in Kazan on the same day that the court in Yekaterinburg convicted Gershkovich.

In April of last year, two Russian journalists, Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, were arrested in Russia on “extremism” charges and accusations of working for a group founded by the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny. They were faced with a maximum of six years for alleged “participation in an extremist organization.”

Brussels estimated that approximately 1,500 journalists from Russia and Belarus fled or moved to the EU in 2024 alone.

Last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the “European Democracy Shield” program as part of the EC’s upcoming priorities. The program’s described aims are to “counter foreign information manipulation and interference online by enhancing media literacy, fact-checking, and enforcing the Digital Services Act.”

Several European leaders over the past year have complained about Moscow’s interference in various member states’ elections and its relentless disinformation campaigns.

The EU parliament last year issued “a strong call” for member states to “increase and better coordinate their efforts to promptly and rigorously counter Russian disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference… to protect the integrity of democratic processes and strengthen the resilience of European societies.”