Glembert
Dear readers and friends of The Moscow Times,
Firstly, I want to thank you: In 2024, your generous donations to The Moscow Times were doubled — over 180,000 euros compared to 90,000 euros in 2023!
How do we spend your donations? First and foremost, your contributions fund our brave colleagues who continue to work discreetly for The Moscow Times inside Russia. Since the Russian authorities declared The Moscow Times an “undesirable organization” in July 2024, we cannot transfer money to Russia through official channels and must rely on alternative methods. Having our own correspondents on the ground ensures that our reporting remains timely and relevant. This is crucial not only for our international audience but also for Russians within Russia: more than 70% of the readers and viewers of our Russian-language channels on Telegram, YouTube, and TikTok are based in Russia. And this number continues to grow. By donating, you support both the English and Russian versions of The Moscow Times, helping to bring truth to Russia and combat Putin’s propaganda and disinformation.
Your donations also enable us to invest in technical development. In addition to the physical war being fought in Europe, a global cyber war is underway, and we as journalists are on the front lines. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship authority, operates with over 5,000 employees and an annual budget of 500 million euros. This year, thanks in part to your support, The Moscow Times was able to hire its first full-time developer. We’re fortunate to work with talented IT specialists from around the world who help us counteract cyberattacks. While our resources may not compare to those of the Kremlin, we are more talented, we have more passion, and yes, the truth is on our side!
As a result, The Moscow Times became the second-largest Russian media outlet in exile on the internet in 2024, according to Similarweb statistics. This achievement reflects not only the quality of our news and analysis but also our ability to outmaneuver censorship and find innovative ways to deliver information to Russia. When one of our articles draws significant attention, Roskomnadzor often allocates additional resources against us, sometimes shutting down our mirror sites every five minutes. However, with the help of our technical partners, we are consistently creating new mirrors to maintain access.
One challenge we faced was how to keep serving readers when a current mirror is blocked in Russia and the new one has yet to go live. In response, we launched a new static, unblocked site in Russian and developed a technical innovation called RDRCT. RDRCT constantly monitors whether our current mirror is accessible in Russia. If it detects a block and the new mirror isn’t ready yet, it automatically redirects readers to our static site. Once the new mirror is activated, RDRCT restores functionality to old article links shared on social media, ensuring that readers can find previously published content. This is very important for the accessibility of our content. Thanks to RDRCT we have not seen a drop in our Russian traffic despite Roskomnadzor’s best efforts — on the contrary, it has increased in 2024.
RDRCT isn’t exclusive to The Moscow Times. It was developed to help all Russian media in exile fight Putin’s disinformation. I am pleased to inform you that we will be sharing RDRCT with three other Russian media in exile at no cost.
This case highlights the importance of supporting large media organizations in exile like The Moscow Times. Our size and scale allows us to raise more funds, develop sophisticated solutions and share them with smaller media outlets that simply don’t have access to such resources.
Another important project we just launched with your support is a weekly newsletter for political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in Russia. Currently, there are over 1,000 such individuals, far exceeding the numbers seen in the late Soviet period.
We can’t run a major fundraising campaign for this initiative or send the newsletters under The Moscow Times’ name, as doing so would prompt Russian authorities to ban the correspondence. Instead, our volunteers in Russia distribute the newsletters via email and mail from random local addresses. Your donations help cover the cost of stamps and envelopes. In our first round of letters, we sent mail to 716 prisoners. Ninety-eight of these prisoners did not receive them, meaning they had recently been transferred to other prisons without us or other human rights projects knowing about it yet. This also means we can help human rights defenders find out when prisoners go missing so they can immediately start working to locate them. Starting in January 2025, with your continued support, we plan to expand the number of recipients of our newsletters.
Thanks to your continued generosity, we can keep bringing truth to light, supporting independent journalism and standing with those who resist oppression. Together, we’re making a difference — thank you!
Yours,
Alexander Gubsky
admin
