Russia's media watchdog on Sunday warned the media not to broadcast interviews with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and also launched an investigation against those who had done it anyway. On Wednesday, N1 Television's Iva Puljic-Sego talked to Ivan Kolpakov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian independent news website Meduza, via video link.

Kolpakov is one of the four Russian journalists who had interviewed the Ukrainian president, and he explained to us the importance of that interview and the reaction of the Putin regime.

(The following is the English-language translation of the conversation as transcribed and published by N1 Zagreb)

“I have to say that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a very strong personality in these difficult circumstances. He made the decision to address Russian journalists directly just as the war is going on, and it was a very powerful decision. We think it was important for him to be able to address Russians directly,” Kolpakov said.

“We announced that we would have this interview a few minutes before we published it, and in that short time the Roskomnadzor threatened us and actually ordered us not to publish that article, although there are legally no grounds for that. Immediately after we published the interview, it was announced that the content of the interview and the activities of the journalists who worked on that interview would be ‘revised’. This does not sound very optimistic in modern-day Russia, because since the beginning of this war Russia imposed military censorship, and literally they made it illegal to refer to this invasion as ‘war’. Publishing anything other than official information that comes from the Ministry of Defense can land you in prison,” Kolpakov explained.

‘Russian journalists are suffering, too’

Kolpakov described how Russian journalists are targeted by threats and intimidation.

“During the war, the Russian authorities decided to close all independent media. That sector was very small to begin with, because the pressure exerted on them has been very high for years. Meduza was launched in Riga, the capital of Latvia, eight years ago, for political reasons. We launched in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea and provoked the war in Donbas.

This war started eight years ago, and eight years ago we realized we had to work from abroad so we did just that. Eight years ago, we thought we might get blocked at some point, and we thought about how we would work from exile, how we might work if we can’t address our readers under normal circumstances. In terms of technology, infrastructure, and psychology, Meduza was better prepared for this than other media outlets. War is a catastrophe and like many other Russian journalists, Russians, and Ukrainians, we are suffering because of this catastrophe too,” Kolpakov said.

“When they blocked us, we expected we would lose a large part of our audience. However, most of them stayed with us. Our readers have learned how to use VPN to reach our website that way. Secondly, we updated our mobile app, which now has special unblocking tools in it, so that Meduza is now the only large Russian media outlet which reaches its audience in Russia,” Kolpakov said.

‘Russians have been consuming the propaganda narrative for years’

“But there is another problem. Russia has a large population and a large part of Russian society prefers to watch television, and when you try to reach these people, you’re up against way more restrictions,” Kolpakov said.

He said that people have been consuming the propaganda narrative for years and that many people are now in a state of denial. “Many Russians probably think this is an unfair war and a disaster, but nevertheless they prefer to believe in propaganda because it comforts them. Also, one thing I noticed recently, among a different kind of people, among those who are strongly against Putin and against the war – I see that they sorely need independent information, for what we do… This is very important to people, and we can see that people need it, they need this information. The anti-government movement is growing, although, unfortunately, it is difficult to see this by looking from the outside,” Kolpakov said.

“Television has been under complete state control for twenty years now and it manipulates people in ways you can’t even imagine, Kolpakov told Iva Puljic-Sego. In addition, because of all the propaganda, it is impossible to gauge how many people actually support Putin, he added.

‘Hope is the only thing we’ve got’

“These figures are all provided by state-controlled agencies. Also, there is the phenomenon of double thinking in Russia, which originated during the USSR which means that when someone comes to your door and asks if you support Putin and the government, you will say that you do – even if you do not actually think that. And it has worked like this in Russia for years. That is why we do not know how large a percentage his supporters make,” Kolpakov said.

“Hope is the only thing we have at the moment. On February 24, when Putin decided to send the army into Ukraine, it marked the end of Russia as we knew it. For millions of people – my friends, my relatives, my colleagues – their future was destroyed in a single day, and it continues getting destroyed more and more every day. This, of course, cannot be compared with the suffering of Ukrainians, not to mention the suffering of four million Ukrainians who were forced to flee, or those who are now in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and other cities. But for Russians, it is a disaster as well, and we must re-examine everything we know about our country, and our responsibility, what it means, and what it is that we need to do. Many of us have taken responsibility, but, unfortunately, we did not do enough to stop this war from happening,” Kolpakov said.