By Brian McDonald, Substack, 7/11/25
“The truth is that repression in Russia is still very selective and limited. Even if you’re against the war, it’s much more likely that you’ll be hit by a car or killed by a falling brick than be repressed. But you don’t get paranoid about bricks every time you go outside, do you?”
So begins an extraordinary dispatch from The Moscow Times — which, despite the name, is Dutch, not Russian. The article, written anonymously for obvious reasons, is a quiet, defiant challenge to the dominant media narratives about modern Russia. It’s not a defence of the Kremlin, nor an apology for authoritarianism. It’s something rarer: a dose of clear-eyed realism in an age of curated hysteria.
The author is a Russian journalist who returned home after a year abroad, expecting arrest, surveillance, or worse. Instead, he found… life. Strange, complicated, contradictory life. “Of course, I’m a little afraid,” he writes. “Especially when a friend asks me ‘aren’t you afraid the FSB will arrest you?’ But I haven’t been paranoid for a long time. I’m not the only one in Russia. There are more of us than you might think.”
It’s hard to reconcile these accounts with what you see in Western media, which often treats Russia as if it were North Korea with snow. As someone who’s moved between both worlds it increasingly feels like we’re living on two different planets. There is the Russia of The Daily Mail and Der Spiegel, where jackboots echo daily and citizens speak only in code, terrified of voicing a thought. And then there’s the real Russia — the one 145 million people live in — where bars stay open late, the borders remain unlocked, and you’re far more likely to be hit by a moron on an electric scooter than interrogated by the FSB.
That’s not to say there is no repression. There are arrests. There are prison sentences — some for things as mild as social media posts. There are red lines, and if you cross them — especially on the Ukraine conflict — the consequences can be severe. The journalist admits as much: “Naturally, I have to work very carefully… And if [the police] find out that I write for The Moscow Times or any other banned media, I could face a substantial fine or even a prison sentence.”
But for a country at war, the system is not as suffocating as outsiders assume. There is no mass mobilisation. Men of military age come and go. The nightclubs are full, the restaurants are jammed, and cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even Rostov or Voronezh feel safer than their Western counterparts. Certainly safer than Amsterdam or Paris or Barcelona.
In Britain or Germany today, you can be arrested for posting pro-Palestinian content. That’s not a hypothetical — it’s happening. Some of the Western European states claiming the moral high ground are detaining thousands of people annually for comments on social media. That’s not a justification; it’s a comparison. And in this age of double standards, comparisons matter.
Too many Western outlets seem committed to a storyline where Russia must always be descending, a grim theatre of horror to justify sanctions, decoupling, and moral posturing. The idea that ordinary life continues — that people still laugh, dance, build friendships, fall in love — is treated as taboo. As if noticing it is a betrayal.
Worse still is the sheer volume of stories written by people who haven’t set foot in Russia for years — often based in Berlin, Riga, or even Brooklyn — reporting on a society they no longer understand, quoting “sources close to the Kremlin” who, in reality, don’t exist. Anyone genuinely close to power in today’s Moscow would not speak to Western media; to do so would be essentially treasonous. What we get instead are vague, unsourced whispers dressed up as revelations. Controlled leaks — when they come — go to a tiny, sanctioned few: Reuters, CNN, maybe The New York Times. The rest of the coverage is padded with conjecture, fantasy, and recycled Twitter threads.
The bias drips from every paragraph. Anonymous quotes from “Russian officials” who speak in perfect press-release English and just happen to align with the worldview of Western elites. Descriptions of cities and people that feel airlifted from Cold War thrillers. A steady refusal to admit that Russia, despite sanctions, war, and geopolitical isolation, is functioning. Not booming in the headline-friendly style of Singapore or Dubai — but trundling along in a way that undermines the narrative of collapse.
Take, for instance, a breathless Daily Beast piece last month titled “Meet the Woman Who Vladimir Putin Fears the Most.” Not a general, not a rogue ex-oligarch, not a cyberwarfare genius — no, apparently it’s a 32-year-old feminist poet. Daria Serenko herself laughed at the absurdity, saying she nearly fell off her chair when she read it. Her activist group can’t even muster 100 Patreon subscribers. She never claimed to be Putin’s nemesis — that fiction was concocted in an English-language newsroom by people who don’t speak Russian, don’t understand the country, and frankly don’t care. It’s not journalism. It’s political fan fiction: a feel-good morality tale for Western audiences, where every Kremlin critic is a lionhearted hero and every headline is a cartoon villain monologue. And if they’ll invent that, what else will they invent?
What this journalist captures so powerfully is the schizophrenia of exile — the gap between what you’re told and what you see. “I think many journalists in exile become prisoners of their own bubble of like-minded anti-war emigrants,” he writes. The exiled media, he suggests, increasingly focuses more on the Russian diaspora than on Russians themselves.
And there are things they miss. “Over the last few months, I’ve met queer people who have found common ground with Z-patriots through unusual situations. I have spoken to hippie hermits who have gone to live in remote forests… I have visited communes in Moscow and St. Petersburg where leftists, queer people and artists live and stage guerrilla art actions.”
That doesn’t sound like a hellscape. It sounds like life under pressure. People don’t vanish; they adapt. They navigate. They find workarounds. And they tell their stories — carefully, quietly, but with conviction.
The most revealing passage might be the one where the journalist describes a quiet moment of paranoia. Sitting in a cafe with a colleague, who whispers: “There’s a guy sitting there. Behind you, with his back to us, behind the bar… I think he was on the bus with me.” They left quickly, just in case.
Even that tension fades. Eventually, he stopped scanning rooms and looking over his shoulder. What replaced the fear wasn’t denial, but familiarity. A survival instinct fine-tuned not to hysteria, but to realism.
In the end, he chooses to stay. Not because it’s safe. Not because it’s easy. But because, as he writes, “I am much more afraid of missing the unfolding story here, of leaving and never returning home. So between those two fears, I choose to face the first one.”
That, in its quiet bravery, may be the most subversive line of all. Not every Russian unhappy with the status quo is in Paris or Berlin. Some remain in Perm or Samara, in cafes and train carriages, staying grounded in reality and rejecting the imported panic.
You won’t read much about them in the West. But they’re still here. And they’re still living. And laughing. And crying. Some are still writing.
***
Putin’s spokesman explains why Moscow believes censorship is a weapon of war
By Brian McDonald, Substack, 7/11/25
If you want to grasp how Russia views itself in the grip of war—how it rationalises, justifies, and narrates its choices—then Dmitry Peskov’s latest interview is essential reading. The voice of President Vladimir Putin for over two decades, Peskov rarely wastes words and seldom speaks off-key. His conversation with Expert magazine, timed to the outlet’s 30th anniversary, lifts the curtain on how Moscow now sees the press: as both a weapon in its arsenal and a shield against what it calls hostile information fire.
As both press secretary and deputy head of the Presidential Administration, Peskov’s words carry institutional weight.
In Western capitals, the verdict on Russia’s press restrictions is swift and damning: censorship, propaganda, control. But what’s seldom heard—perhaps because few bother to listen—is how the story sounds from Moscow’s side of the glass. Peskov, speaking without bluster, lays out a case that’s less about silencing dissent than about holding the line in what he calls an information war. It’s not a plea for sympathy. It’s an argument for why the Kremlin sees the narrowing of the media field as long overdue.
“Now is a time of military censorship—unprecedented for our country,” he says bluntly. “The war is being waged not just with weapons, but in the information space.”
The argument is not new, but the framing is telling. According to Peskov, Russia faces a two-pronged challenge: a hot war in Ukraine and a broader information campaign waged by foreign-backed media and hostile platforms. He believes that some Russian-language outlets—operating from abroad—are explicitly geared toward undermining the Russian state.
“There are media that deliberately engage in discrediting Russia,” he says. “And it would be wrong to ignore them.”
He defends the restrictive environment as a necessary response not only to the war, but to what he characterises as years of adversarial coverage. In Peskov’s telling, skepticism toward Russia was baked into the editorial DNA of some domestic newsrooms and effectively institutionalised.
“I would even say that for a number of Russian media, expressing doubt or negativity about their own country was part of the editorial policy.”
The rise of more patriotic coverage over the past three years, in his view, is a corrective—not an aberration.
“Being a patriot is not some great achievement—it’s a normal human condition,” he says.
Peskov does concede that some loyalist outlets might go overboard, adding with characteristic sharpness: “There will always be those to whom the saying applies: ‘Teach a fool to pray, and he’ll knock his head against the floor.’”
But Peskov—Putin’s long-time spokesman—is firm in his belief that Moscow has no intention of returning to what he sees as the bad old days—when tearing strips off the country passed for analysis, and constructive criticism was in short supply. He reserves particular ire for Meduza, the Riga-based outlet branded a foreign agent by Moscow, dismissing its tone as “rabid.”
That criticism doesn’t land in a vacuum. Even before the war in Ukraine, Russia had long grown used to its portrayal in Western media—a country boxed in caricature, its failings broadcast with clockwork regularity, its achievements barely granted a line. You’d be forgiven, surveying two decades of headlines, for thinking Russia had no scientists, no artists, no valid grievances—just villains in suits and shadows.
Meanwhile, some of the loudest Russian-language outlets—The Moscow Times, Current Time, Svoboda, and yes, Meduza—were openly funded by Western governments or affiliated institutions. That funding wasn’t a secret, nor was it apolitical. Western states didn’t bankroll these outlets out of curiosity. They funded them to serve strategic purposes—and flattering Moscow was never on the brief.
Faced with this imbalance, Russia built its own response—RT, Sputnik, a global push to tell its story in its own words. But the effort was swiftly met with claims of propaganda and blacklists. Since 2022, RT has been barred across the EU. Moscow, for its part, answered in kind, shutting out a host of Western-funded publications from operating on its soil.
So now, we’re left with a media world split down the middle: two narratives, each one largely sealed off from the other, each convinced of its own authority.
Even Peskov seems to grasp that this stand-off can’t last forever. Not if you want to keep the public’s trust. Not if you want to build anything that might pass for consensus.
“Of course, the time will come when a softer information policy will be in demand,” he says. “Then we will see the emergence of a larger number of neutral media outlets—those that write about both problems and achievements.”
But if there’s to be that future, it will have to reckon with the cost of the present. The sharpening of Russia’s media laws has not come without consequence. Since 2022, statutes targeting “false information” and “discrediting” the armed forces have been used to detain and jail a range of voices.
In April, four journalists were each sentenced to five and a half years in prison over alleged ties to a group founded by the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny. All four denied wrongdoing, saying they were being punished not for conspiracy, but for their reporting. Maria Ponomarenko, another journalist, is serving a six-year sentence over claims she spread falsehoods about the Russian military.
Of course, not everyone buys the hymn sheet. Human rights groups call the new laws a wrecking ball for press freedom. Even within Russia, there are voices—quieter now, but not gone—that see the Kremlin’s doctrine less as strategy, more as slow suffocation.
Cases like these are held up in the West as emblematic of repression. Yet Russia is not alone in drawing blood where journalism cuts too close: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2024 global census, Israel jailed more media workers in Palestine and its occupied territories than Russia. Still, the Kremlin’s legal red lines have been drawn with unmistakable force.
As the news cycle barrels forward—shorter, louder, faster—Peskov sees opportunity in slowness and specialisation. He argues that in an age of instant takes and shrinking attention spans, demand is rising for curated, subject-driven content in niche sectors like aviation or metallurgy.
“There is a huge layer of sectoral issues that are of public interest, but which few are seriously analysing,” he notes.
In his telling, the future of journalism won’t hinge on speed but depth—on mastering a field and making it legible to power. That’s the role he sees for serious media going forward: to support informed decisions, not just spark arguments.
Whether one agrees with his views or not, Peskov’s remarks are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Russia sees the information war—and why the Kremlin sees its current media doctrine as both deliberate and necessary
In a world where every side preaches its own gospel, it helps to hear the sermon from the pulpit itself. You don’t have to believe it. But you do need to understand it. This is one of those moments.
