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In October of 2022, Olesia Krivtsova, a nineteen-year-old student in Russia, posted a series of messages on social media that would change her life. Several months earlier, Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine, and Krivtsova, like millions of Russians, was enraged. On Instagram and VKontakte, a Russian app, she blasted her government and voiced support for anti-war protesters. Within months, a regional court judge in Arkhangelsk, a northwestern port city, charged her with supporting terrorism and “discrediting” the Russian army, and placed her under house arrest. Fearing for her freedom, in March of 2023 she fled Russia and resettled in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Soon after, Thomas Nilsen, the editor of the Barents Observer, a nonprofit regional news outlet that had chronicled her dramatic escape, published an op-ed inviting Krivtsova to join his newsroom in Kirkenes, an Arctic town in Norway nine miles from the Russian border. “It’s not the most common way to hire journalists,” Krivtsova told me. But that August, she began training as a Barents Observer reporter.
Since the start of the war, the Observer, which covers Scandinavia and the Arctic, has become a safe haven for exiled Russian journalists. They include Georgii Chentemirov, the former head of the journalism labor union in Karelia, Russia, and Farida Kurbangaleeva, a former anchor on state television. Denis Zagore, a former host on Radio Murmansk who covered the violent crackdown on anti-war protests, left Russia for Norway with his wife in 2022 and began working for the Observer. Last October, Russia declared him an enemy of the state. “I’m surprised it took so long,” he laughed. Far from home and mostly banned from reentry, these new Observer recruits have documented the erratic, autocratic arrests of Russian civilians and business leaders, tracked the movement of Putin’s yacht, and analyzed his declining popularity. And as other exiled Russian-language media face funding challenges, the Observer has raised a budget of more than five hundred thousand dollars through grants and donations, including a partnership with the University of Tromsø, a state-backed institution specializing in research on the Arctic. That budget supports a full-time staff of seven.
When I visited the Observer offices, I found a newsroom decorated with vodka glasses from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and a wooden model submarine that was a gift from a Russian naval official (complete with a secret booze compartment). In a corner, I saw a flex desk for reporters passing through. The Observer team was busy covering the impact of fuel shortages in rural Russia, the result of Ukraine’s summer campaign of drone strikes targeting oil refineries.
“It’s very difficult to do journalism in Northwest Russia today, but it’s not impossible—as long as the telephones and internet are working,” Nilsen said. That task became no easier this month, when Vitaly Orlov, a Russian fishing tycoon, sued the Observer for defamation, claiming its reporting about EU and Norwegian sanctions against his trawler fleet damaged his reputation among English-language readers. In an editorial, Nilsen and Atle Staalesen, the publisher of the Observer, replied that they were only reporting on the European Council’s allegations: that Orlov’s boats were spying on Europe and its submarine cables. “Giving people the opportunity to keep doing their profession is important. We cannot save the world, but we can make it a little better,” Nilsen added.
In her time at the Observer, Krivtsova has investigated Russian diplomats and anti-protest crackdowns, and she has profiled fellow exiles. In July, a military court in Severomorsk, a town in far northwestern Russia, sentenced Krivtsova, in absentia, to six years in prison. “If I were nineteen again I would do the same thing and write the same thing,” she wrote in a statement to the military court. “Only without the grammatical errors.”
The Observer started off in 2002 as a bilingual, one-man newsroom founded and funded by Staalesen, a Norwegian journalist who’d studied in Moscow. In 2005, the Norwegian Barents Secretariat, an agency that promotes bilateral ties between Norway and Russia, hired Staalesen as a project manager. Intrigued by the Observer’s potential, the office encouraged him to continue running it as a side venture, eventually providing him with free space and funding an expansion of its website along with salaries to hire additional staff, including Nilsen. It remained Staalesen’s project until the secretariat bought the domain in 2013.
Everything changed in April of 2014, when Nilsen published an editorial criticizing Russia’s invasion of Crimea. The secretariat demanded editorial oversight of the Observer after the Russian consul in Kirkenes accused the office of funding anti-Russian propaganda. In response, Nilsen, Staalesen, and Trude Pettersen, a reporter, resigned and established a new publication housed next door to the secretariat. On October 7, 2015—Putin’s birthday and the anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter—the Barents Observer was reborn, this time as a cooperative nonprofit, available to the public with no paywall. (The secretariat initially threatened to sue over the use of the name, but backed down in the face of local protests.) The date, Nilsen told me, was just a coincidence. “For ten years we had been encouraging Russian journalists to stand up for their journalistic rights,” he said. “If we didn’t stand up when that hit us, we could never speak to those Russians again.”
The Observer workers took no salary, living off their savings and coffee provided by local businesses. A sympathetic landlord let them use the space rent-free. Forgoing an internet connection, the team published stories via mobile-phone hotspot. By the spring of 2016, the Observer had raised enough money through donations from local supporters and a few publicly funded startup grants to pay Nilsen, Staalesen, and a reporter roughly a thousand dollars each per month. Moscow took notice, banning Nilsen from entering Russia in 2017 and blocking citizens from accessing the Observer’s website two years later. Most of the Observer’s readers in Russia use VPNs to access its site.
By 2019, the Observer had raised a hundred thousand dollars through community donations and small grants from groups such as the Fritt Ord Foundation, a free-speech organization. In the three months following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Observer’s confirmed readership quadrupled and the newsroom began tapping into longer-term funding.
Since 2023, the Tinius Trust, a national press freedom foundation, and the University of Tromsø have funded the salaries of exiled Russian reporters through annual grants of ninety thousand and four hundred thousand dollars, respectively. This year, both agreed to renew the funding for another three years. Staalesen and Nilsen, the Observer’s only two Norwegian reporters, are paid out of the roughly sixty-two thousand dollars in annual reader donations, as well as award money from journalism competitions, short-term grants from the likes of Fritt Ord, and a republication deal with Arctic Today for a thousand dollars a month.
With the war still raging, Nilsen wants to keep growing, with hopes of securing central government funding to hire as many as ten additional exiled Russian journalists. “Our plan A is to continue doing what we’re doing,” he said. “But if Norway wants, we’re ready to expand.”
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