September 1, 2017. It was the first day of school in Russia, a much-beloved unofficial holiday, and President Vladimir Putin was on stage in a national TV broadcast, chatting with jeans-clad teenagers about the future.

,” he told them, “not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Then,  this March, in the final moments of Putin’s re-election campaign, came a stern message to lawmakers at his annual address to parliament: “The speed of technological progress is accelerating sharply... Those who manage to ride this technological wave will surge far ahead. Those who fail to do this will be submerged and drown.”

, Russia “needs to eliminate all barriers to the development and wide use of robotic equipment, artificial intelligence, unmanned vehicles, e-commerce, and big-data-processing technology.”

Spurred from the top, could Russia one day muster real competition with the great powers in the AI field? The implications of the question are great, as indeed, current and potential applications of the technology cross sectors and range from the beneficial to the malign. Russia’s recent social-media-based propaganda campaigns to influence Western elections employed only relatively basic AI, but achieved certain impact. Today, it is unclear whether the country can achieve top AI status, but from Washington to Beijing, other capitals are tracking Moscow’s efforts.

The undisputed world leaders in artificial intelligence are the United States and China. Compared to their investment in the field, the Russian government lags far behind. According to the Russian tech website 

, the size of the AI/machine learning market in the country was less than $12 million in 2017. That’s estimated to grow, and markedly, to some $460 million by 2020. Still, the figure is dwarfed by the roughly 

 last year on AI and allied fields like big data and cloud computing. 

Yet even if Russia’s AI industry is in its nascence, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, is nervous.

Looming larger and larger in the Defense Department’s rear-view mirror is China. Beijing alone plans to build an artificial intelligence 

 with $2.12-billion price tag. By 2020, the country envisions developing a domestic AI industry worth more than $24 billion, a figure that the government says will more than double five years after that.

Yet even if Russia’s AI industry is in its nascence, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, is nervous. This January, at a BBC event in London, he was asked about Vladimir Putin’s “ruler of the world” prediction.

,” he said. “I think both the Russian and the Chinese leaders have recognized the value of this, not just for their commercial aspirations, but also their military aspirations.”  

From Peter the Great in the 18th century to the Soviet era, and now under Putin, Russia has been intent to, as Lenin termed it, “catch up and surpass” the West. (In this case, the East, too.) The president’s urgings should be viewed, 

 of the American Foreign Policy Council, as “a recognition of Russia’s current place in this unfolding technology race, and of the need by the nation’s government, private sector, and the military to marshal the needed resources to persevere in this domain.” 

If Russia is to “ride this technological wave,” as Putin describes it, the country will need people like Artem Kukharenko.	

About three miles north of the Kremlin, in a small office inside a high-rise building, Kukharenko is seated at his computer close to a large window, silhouetted against Moscow’s skyline. On his computer screen is a photograph of a woman’s face with a fine net of tiny white lines displayed across it. It’s a depiction, he tells me, of the facial recognition software that he and several fellow computer geeks developed and then used as a springboard to start their company, 

The software relies on AI technology, employing algorithms to rapidly compare photos of individuals against a face-image database. It can be used for a wide variety of purposes: verifying a face to unlock a smartphone; scanning shoppers to compile data on customers; locating missing people; finding a potential date; identifying criminals; and, in some cases, targeting political opponents. 	

Kukharenko is as close to a Silicon-Valley-style entrepreneur as you can get in Russia. The son of a chemist and a physicist, it was perhaps genetic fate that he was a math whiz from an early age. As a kid, he says, his love of computer games led him to learn coding, so he could make his own. He eventually was accepted by the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University, Russia’s premier training center for computer science, leading to freelance gigs at Purdue University’s e-Lab and Samsung’s Moscow research center.

Kukharenko’s company, which opened its doors in 2015, now has a staff of 50 – most of them developers and researchers in the area of neural networks, computer systems modeled on the human brain. Its work is earning international notice. Last November, NtechLab 

 to win the Face Recognition Prize Challenge, a competition run by the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, outstripping the others in terms of both accuracy and speed of recognition. 

FindFace, one early application of the facial recognition software, allows users of Russia’s largest social media network, VKontakte, to find friends by searching through photos. Its popularity, though, has not come without ethical issues: A young artist in St. Petersburg who had privacy concerns about FindFace started a project he dubbed “Your Face is Big Data.” After taking pictures of passengers on the subway without their permission, he then matched them with their VKontakte page. He told 

 that, theoretically, the service “could be 

 or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.” In another worrying use of the technology, a Russian imageboard used FindFace to identify and 

 who had appeared in pornography or who had worked as prostitutes. 

Kukharenko counters that any technology, not just his software, can be used for good ends or bad: “With this service, we wanted to demonstrate that such technology exists, that it’s not part of a fantasy film – and people should think twice about what information about themselves they put out there.” 

He points to the benefits of NtechLab’s technology, such as “smart demographics” for retail companies. Using closed-circuit television cameras to scan shoppers, facial recognition can “show that you usually have women who are smiling, let’s say, who are from 30 to 40 years old and who buy specific products,” he explains. That helps merchants zero in on what should be displayed and what their customers want. 

In so-called “smart cities” – cities and towns that leverage modern technology and data to improve efficiency and quality of life – facial recognition can be used in conjunction with CCTV. “As people pass by those cameras,” Kukharenko explains, “you can compare them to a database of criminals and, if a criminal walks by, a report can be sent to law enforcement.”	

In Moscow and in the Tatarstan region, the company has agreements to pilot-test its system of “video analytics” in conjunction with the local governments’ CCTV cameras.  According to the news website Meduza, Moscow alone has approximately 

 in buildings and courtyards, on roads, in public transportation, and in other locations.

In the Ryazan region, the Interior Ministry is using a mobile biometric system equipped with facial recognition by NtechLab. “It allows them to identify faces at mass events,” Kukharenko says – which raises the possibility that police could use the technology to identify and arrest political protesters. He stresses that his company “does not work directly with governments.” Rather, it works with other companies that do actively work with governments – a network of partners that stretches from New Zealand to Brazil, including the U.S. and China.

Should it choose to emulate the Chinese model, Russia has a long way to go; there are an estimated 170 million surveillance cameras in China, with plans to install 400 million more in the next three years, 

. China calls it the world's biggest camera surveillance network. During the Lunar New Year holiday, Chinese police even used 

, made by a Beijing-based company, to surveil large numbers of citizens traveling to visit relatives. 

Artifical intelligence, in Russia and elsewhere, has the potential not only to help expose the truth – as in revealing shopping patterns or uncovering criminals – but to deceive as well. 

A study by Harvard University’s Belfer Center warns that AI will “dramatically enhance capabilities for the collection and analysis of data, but also the creation of data.” In intelligence operations, there will be more sources from which to discern the truth, the paper argues, but “it will also be much 

Russia already used machine learning – a subset of AI that enables machine to improve at tasks with experience – to deploy armies of bots, targeted ads, and more during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Since the vote, post-mortems have revealed the specifics of how Russian intelligence exploited social media platforms like Facebook to create fake user accounts and, from those, spread disinformation, disseminate divisive content on issues like racial justice and gay rights, and sway support.

In a prime example of the dual nature of AI, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress last month that AI would help win the cyber “arms race” with Moscow.

In contrast to China, Russia rarely uses propaganda in the West to tout its own achievements. Instead, Moscow seeks to undermine Western democracy and exploit failures and weaknesses in Western institutions. Its approach to AI sometimes mirrors that strategy.  

“Right now, Russia does not have the means to compete with the United States and China, which have both marshalled more significant human capital and strategic investment,” says Eleonore Pauwels, director of the AI Lab at the Wilson Center. “Yet, the AI know-how that Russia has can be used for creating chaos on the international scene. Creating chaos is cheap, but comes at a cost for other actors.”

(In a prime example of the dual nature of AI, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress last month that AI would help 

There are more sophisticated AI-powered disinformation applications on the way. One striking example is machine learning technology recently developed by researchers at the University of Washington that can literally put words in the mouth of a political leader. The Seattle-based team took audio of former President Barack Obama speaking about terrorism and other subjects, converted that audio into mouth shapes using a mouth synthesis technique, 

 with video of Obama recorded at another time. 

Could a lip-synching president “declare” war on another country? It’s among the more hypotheticals of a new, AI-equipped world. 

For now, Russia’s drive for AI parity is concentrated primarily on its military. In Syria, Moscow uses 

 as well as an AI-equipped unmanned underwater vehicle that seeks out unexploded ordnance. The Russian armed forces also have ambitious plans to implement AI technology in combat aircraft, missiles, and electronic warfare systems, an area in which they already have formidable expertise.  

To develop new, Russian-made technology, however, requires unleashing a new generation of developers – and a new philosophical approach – says the American Foreign Policy Council’s Bendett. “A lot of young scientists, and young Russians in the Russian military, grew up in the digital age, just like their American and Chinese counterparts,” he says. “Many of these young people probably went and studied overseas and brought that experience home, so the Russian military will probably build on that.”

But can it keep that talent home? In 2010, the Kremlin broke ground on its much-hyped 

, a sprawling tech campus on the outskirts of Moscow, which aimed to foment start-up culture and ignite venture capitalism. Results have been paltry and some critics blame the top-down approach. “The MOD is trying to install the American-style culture of flexibility to certain military innovations and developments,” says Bendett. But translating Silicon Valley into Russian won’t be easy: “Russia lacks that type of infrastructure right now and is trying to re-create it almost from scratch.” 

 on artificial intelligence, Minister Sergey Shoigu urged military and civilian scientists to join forces in developing AI technology which, he said, was crucial for countering “possible threats to the technological and economic security of Russia.” That stated approach is similar to the Pentagon’s 

, which provides capital to fund pilot contracts for commercial innovation with military applications. The Russian government also has created the 

, which supports high-tech innovation for the country’s defense and national security. It’s modeled on the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or 

, which works with innovators inside and outside of government to invest in breakthrough technologies. 

The Defense Ministry is even planning to build an entire city for military innovation. An article on the website 

, the Ministry’s Soviet-born official publication, describes “Era” as a “military innovation technopolis.” Located in Anapa, a picturesque town on Black Sea, it would provide more than 2,000 young military scientists the opportunity to pursue research in eight fields, including AI, robotics, and super-computing. While the project sounds reminiscent of the “closed” military-industrial cities in which scientists lived and worked during the Cold War, the plan is to 

 in cooperation with the private sector. 

“This is a more modern take, although it remains to be seen if the Russian government has learned anything from Skolkovo,” says Michael Kofman, a research scientist at CNA Corporation. “It's rather difficult to create advancements in that sort of environment, nor is it especially attractive to the current generation of technology developers.”

Even as it tries to mimic U.S.-style public-private cooperation, Russia is studying China’s strategy, which combines heavy government control with private-sector business and academic research. In “trying to walk the middle line” between the two approaches, Bendett says, Moscow is looking to arrive at “something highly unique to Russia.”

In February, America’s premier inventor, Elon Musk, and his SpaceX engineers successfully launched a rocket with 27 engines firing in unison, the kind of feat the USSR tried – and failed – to accomplish more than half a century ago. “Nowhere did [the] launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket echo 

“We aren't out of mathematicians. What we are out of is dreamers.” 

Indeed, the lesson from Musk’s accomplishment wasn’t lost on Russia’s leaders, nor its scientists. Even with the full weight of governmental funding and political support, Moscow isn’t planning on launching anything similar until 2028. Vitaly Egorov of Dauria Aerospace, a private satellite manufacturer that works with the Russian government, was 

: “We aren't out of mathematicians. What we are out of is dreamers.” 

But back in his Moscow office, NtechLab’s Kukharenko still yearns to perfect his facial recognition technology – to make it faster and more precise. “We want to remain the technological leaders in the area,” he says. And will there one day be an international agreement, like a nuclear arms control agreement, on acceptable use of the kind of technology he creates? “Maybe not on AI overall, because it’s a very broad subject,” he tells me, “but with facial recognition, yes, there probably will be some limits. Facial recognition gives you an indisputable advantage.”

The idea of international AI governance is not at the front of Kukharenko’s mind, even as his own endeavors are helping technology outpace regulation efforts. On that issue, the world as a whole, not just Russia, may soon find itself playing catch-up.

) is a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute and a CNN contributor. She reported full-time for CNN for more than three decades, including as Moscow bureau chief.

is chief digital officer at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. She previously held positions at Amazon and 

Cover photo: KIKI the robot greets participants at a private sector 

 on AI and business applications in Moscow, April 25, 2017. (Courtesy of Shutterstock/Pavel L Photo and Video)

shutterstock_662074432.jpg

From the reign of Peter the Great to the Soviet era, and now under President Putin, Russia has been intent to, as Lenin termed it, “catch up and surpass” the West. That ambition applies to AI, too.

Russia Tries to Get Smart about Artificial Intelligence

It was one of those media stories about President Vladimir Putin that appear almost daily in Russia: Nikita Gusev, a sculptor in St. Petersburg, had crafted a 150 pound life-sized statue of Putin in chocolate.

“On one hand, the chocolate is soft and malleable,” 

. “On the other side, it can be very hard. It is very flexible, it can take any form. I think this material really represents him because he is like that.”

Vladimir Putin’s “hard” and “soft” sides constantly confound the West. When he annexed Crimea in 2014 — an action the West described as undermining the security structure of Europe — he did it with masked, unmarked special forces that he dubbed “polite” people, denying at first they were Russian military, then later openly admitting it.

he deployed the Russian air force to Syria

, he shocked the West, but then promptly invited the United States and the European Union to join hands with him “without any delay” in a “broad coalition” to fight extremists.

This herky-jerky international behavior leads some in the West to call Putin unpredictable at best and unstable at worst. His foreign military operations — including the 

, the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and his air campaign in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad — have severely undermined both European and American trust in Russia.

Putin’s “hard/soft” strategy can be unpredictable, but it has its own internal logic. His binary approach is a key aspect of his geopolitical ambitions, dictated by a need to both consolidate and preserve power at home while at the same time pursuing a policy of integration with the West — integration, however, on his own terms.

Putin’s “hard/soft” strategy can be unpredictable, but it has its own internal logic.

Domestically, Vladimir Putin continues to build a “Fortress Russia,” nursing grievances, assuring his fellow Russians that they are a civilization apart — superior to the West, and strong enough to withstand any economic pressure imposed from abroad. Russian society is increasingly militarized, with constant references to the glory and valor of czarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Retro Soviet symbols, from red flags to hammer and sickle-adorning knickknacks, seem to be in every gift shop. Putin has even ordered the creation of a modern version of the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers organization, a way of promoting Russian values.

Beyond Russia’s borders, Putin employs Moscow’s “hard power” thanks to his rebuilt and increasingly competent military, projecting Moscow’s interests and exploiting any hint of indecision or weakness on the part of Western leaders.

one opinion column in the Kremlin-funded online outlet sputniknews.com put it

, “the people of the West — of Europe especially — targeted by jihadi terrorists, have cause to be grateful to the Russian people and government for protecting them from the follies of their own governments.”

But while excoriating the West, the Russian president increasingly says he wants to work with it, even defend it.

, for example, Putin had the United States in his crosshairs, denouncing a “policy of containment” which, he argued, had been carried out against Russia “for centuries … whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent.”

, delivered in the midst of his Syrian air campaign, the Russian president once again depicted the U.S. as the main villain in the world, yet refrained from naming it. “We know who decided to oust the unwanted regimes and brutally impose their own rules,” he charged. “Where has this led them? They stirred up trouble, destroyed the countries’ statehood, set people against each other, and then ‘washed their hands,’ as we say in Russia, thus opening the way to radical activists, extremists and terrorists.”

Then a pivot, the “hard” Putin showing his more malleable side. Russia, he said, was “at the forefront” of a titanic battle against terrorism, “a fight for freedom, truth, and justice, for the lives of people, and the future of all civilization.” One country cannot defeat international terrorism alone, he said. “Every civilized country must contribute to the fight against terrorism, reaffirming their solidarity, not in word but in deed.”

Scorning the West while offering to cooperate with it, however, can be a tough balancing act, blurring the lines between enemy and ally. Turkey’s November 2015 shoot-down of a Russian warplane participating in the Syrian air campaign gave President Putin a new, specific enemy against which he could rally the Russian people.

During his December State of the Nation address, Putin lashed out

 at Turkey and its president: “We will never forget their collusion with terrorists! We have always deemed betrayal the worst and most shameful thing to do, and that will never change. I would like them to remember this — those in Turkey who shot our pilots in the back, those hypocrites who tried to justify their actions and cover up for terrorists.”

Putin’s “emotionality” is not just histrionics.

In a speech usually dedicated to the priorities of the Russian government, the venom was striking. Leonid Isaev, writing in 

 newspaper, drew deeper conclusions from Putin’s tone. “Strained relations with Turkey once again have demonstrated the excessive emotionality of Russia’s external policies,” he wrote, “and its unbalanced character, as a result of which the leadership is becoming more inclined toward making rash decisions, deepening its difficult position.”

Putin’s “emotionality” is not just histrionics. Internationally it may seem over the top, but at home, Putin has molded his foreign policy into a powerful domestic instrument. Looking tough, standing up to the United States, and proving that Russia is a great power on the world stage helps him to consolidate power at home, and emboldens him to take steps that, in some cases, are detrimental to his own people.

In spite of Western sanctions and Russia’s counter-sanctions that deprived Russian consumers of imported cheese, fruits, and vegetables, President Putin’s approval ratings have remained constant at approximately 85 percent. A poll of Russians 

 in early December 2015 found that 48 percent of respondents said there is no one who could replace Putin as president. Almost a third of Russians polled also agreed with the statement, “our people [Russians] constantly need a strong hand,” and 39 percent agreed that “there are such situations in which, like now, you need to concentrate all power in individual hands.” Just one-fifth of those polled said that power should never be concentrated in the hands of one person.

Even Russia’s isolation — a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine — has not turned Russians against their president. In some ways, the thinking of the average Russian mirrors that of Putin himself.

In some ways, the thinking of the average Russian mirrors that of Putin himself.

Just as Putin assails the West while urging it to join him in an anti-terrorist coalition, 82 percent of Russians, according to a Levada Center focus group, support the annexation of Crimea and, while not opposing improving relations with Europe and the United States, two-thirds of them think Russia should stick to its international policies in spite of Western sanctions.

The West is likely to hear more proposals from President Putin for taking common action with Moscow. In some cases it will be useful, even unavoidable, as in the case of Iran’s nuclear program, and in Syria, where a political transition will be impossible with the efforts of Washington and Moscow.

The West should also be prepared for an assertive Putin to position himself as the catalyst of action, rejecting Western rules of the game. His “hard/soft” strategy relies on an intrinsic tension between cooperation and domination. Vladimir Putin will not take a backseat anymore. If he cannot dominate, he will work to ensure that his Western partners also cannot run the show.

 is a former Wilson Center fellow, journalist, and expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union. During her three-decade career with CNN, she served as foreign affairs correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and White House correspondent. You can follow her on Twitter 

MOG1A472aepU9eFXWTU9Rtrb1TFG0P3c.jpeg

The unpredictability of Vladimir Putin’s “hard” and “soft” sides constantly confound the West, but his approach has an internal logic of its own.

Putin’s hard/soft strategy

This February, as warning signs of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine were flashing, I flew to Moscow to provide analysis for CNN. I was the network’s Moscow bureau chief for almost a decade, and they frequently reach out during major breaking news.

My live-shot schedule was long and intense but, when I was finished for the day—or, more often, the night—I tried to meet with Russian friends and former colleagues, both to see how they were doing and to get their opinion on what Vladimir Putin was planning.

I was set to have coffee with one friend, Mikhail (Misha) Fishman, a well-known independent TV journalist. But on February

22, Russian tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine on what the Kremlin dubbed a “peacekeeping mission.” Two days later, Putin officially announced his “special military operation.”

I got a cryptic text from Misha: “My family and I are going on vacation to Baku.” My old Soviet-era instincts kicked in. Going on vacation was the last thing Misha would do as a war was breaking out. But I knew it was best not to ask any questions—just stop texting and wait. I soon learned that my friend and his family had fled to Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Russian parliament passed a law forbidding use of words like “war” or “invasion” to describe Putin’s war, with a penalty of 15 years in prison. The government blocked the website of Misha’s channel, Dozhd TV (TV Rain). Within a few days, they shut themselves down and several journalists fled the country fearing for their safety.

I had to leave Russia early in March because of that law, which made it impossible to do any realistic reporting on the invasion. My Lufthansa flight back to the U.S. was cancelled when Western sanctions kicked in, but as an American, I was not afraid for my safety as several of my Russians friends were. In a Moscow café, one of them described to me her “Plan A, Plan B, Plan C” for getting out. She eventually got a plane ticket to Yerevan, Armenia, and is now in Poland. Others fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, or to the Baltic countries.

In mid-May I headed to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to find some of those journalists, most of whom I knew from Moscow.  

A day after I arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, I got a text in Russian: “Jill, hi, we heard you’re in Vilnius. Would you like to join us for our morning show?” The text was from Tatyana (Tanya) Felgenhauer and Alexandr (Sasha) Plushchev, both of whom were anchors on Echo Moscow Radio, an influential channel that had abruptly vanished. Echo Moscow chronicled the earliest days of post-Soviet Russia and, during the Putin years, it hung on despite increasing Kremlin pressure to toe the line. Now it was gone, shut down by its Board of Directors after Russia’s censorship watchdog, Roskomnadzor, blocked its website for allegedly disseminating “deliberately false information” about the Russian military and for supporting “extremist activity” and “violence.”

I was a frequent guest on Echo during my time as bureau chief and had joined Tanya and Sasha via Zoom several times over the past few years from Washington, D.C. Now in Vilnius, I agreed to join them on their 

. In Russia, YouTube has become a kind of alternate television; many young Russians no longer watch state TV, which is filled with propaganda and increasingly irrelevant.

Their studio was a large room in a commercial building where friends were allowing them to work. Complete with LED studio lights, a “green screen” behind them, and a square black “anchor desk” in the middle, Tanya and Sasha sat, each with a laptop and microphone, facing two TV cameras. They were in a live conversation with viewers about the war and waved me over to a third seated microphone. We talked on air for a half hour or so. Sasha happily reported later that 25,000 people had watched our YouTube discussion.

When the show was over, I switched on my phone and interviewed them, speaking in Russian. Tanya had just arrived in Vilnius. She told me she “hung on” in Moscow for the first three months of the Ukraine war.

“At first, it was adrenaline, they’re shutting down Echo Moscow, everyone’s leaving, you have trouble understanding what’s happening . . . you want to see everything, you want to be a witness of everything, plus, foreign journalists are constantly calling you and saying ‘How can this be happening?’ And you feel yourself very much needed; . . . and then one month goes by, and then a second month, and then you understand you have absolutely no work. You have no perspective, you have a YouTube channel where you continue to say the things you’ve gotten used to saying, but every day you’re reading reports that yet another journalist has been arrested or put in jail. So there’s no work and there are a lot of risks and you think, ‘Why am I staying here?’”

“I thought I wanted to see it to the end,” she explained. “But a thought came to me: ‘Tanya, if they put you in jail, you won’t see how this ends, because in prison they show First Channel (state) TV and they won’t show any of how it will end.”

Many members of the elite have huge doubts—and fear—about what will happen next. Will Putin win? Will Putin lose?

I asked her how Alexey Venediktov, the well-known former editor-in-chief of Echo Moscow, was doing. The last I had heard, some unknown persons had left a pig’s head, along with scrawled anti-Semitic slurs, at his apartment door.

“Yes, there were several incidents. They threw the pig’s head. Then they closed Echo Moscow, the media were liquidated, and after a bit, they put Venediktov on the register of ‘foreign agents,’” she said. Russia’s “foreign agent” law was passed in 2012, targeting nongovernmental organizations, media outlets, individual journalists, and, most recently, individual Russian citizens who receive monetary assistance from abroad, forcing them to register and report in minute detail their financial dealings, and often imposing large fines for being a foreign agent.

There is a sliver of former Echo staff still working in Moscow, Tanya said, doing some of the popular former shows, but it’s all on YouTube and it’s called the “Live Nail,” not “Echo Moscow.” The brand name “Echo Moscow” belongs to Gazprom Media, part of the massive state-controlled energy company Gazprom.

I asked Sasha Plushchev when he arrived in Vilnius. He was on a business trip, he explained, when the war began. His flight was one of the last to leave Russia. “But I was planning on coming back to Russia. I had a ticket through Istanbul. I was checked in for the flight.”

“So why did you decide to stay abroad?” I asked him.

“They closed Echo Moscow,” Sasha said. “And I realized that if I was waiting for a signal, that was the signal.”

Other Echo Moscow journalists are in Vilnius, which has become one of the biggest centers of émigré journalism: Nino Rosebashvili, Michael Nacke, and Stanislav Kryuchkov.

I ask Tanya and Sasha if they plan to return to Russia.

“Of course,” they reply, “as soon as it’s possible.”

“For me, this is a long business trip,” Tanya adds. “We continue to work, and we’ll return in order to work.”

“And can you return with Putin in power?” I ask them. “No, absolutely!” they answer. “It’s impossible.”

“Even if Putin wrote us a letter and said . . .” Tanya finishes his sentence: “Yeah, we’d write a letter to him—‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, it’s better if you go directly to the Hague. We’ll meet in court!’”

The inevitable question—how will all this end? The grinding, bloody war in Ukraine and the tense situation in Russia, which the authorities are trying to sweep under the rug. Could there actually be a revolution, as some opposition-minded Russians predict?

“On the one hand, in Russia everything is possible,” Tanya replies. “On the other hand, I often see people who have ‘wishful thinking’ (she says that in English). Everywhere they see some signals and signs that the Putin regime will be gone. But we don’t see that yet. So, I’m not just being careful about predictions, I simply don’t make them.”

Sasha looks to the Russian elite for hints of what might unfold: “I think, never before in the Russian elite, has there, on the one hand, been such unity, because they need to group together around Vladimir Putin and, on the other hand, there’s never been so much major doubt.”

“People who were ready to put up with everything, who were satisfied with everything under Putin, have stopped putting up with it. I call that ‘the rocks are shaking,’ so to speak, you know, when there’s an earthquake. Things are shaking, and you know something is going to happen.”

Many members of the elite, he believes, have huge doubts—and fear—about what will happen next. Will Putin win? Will Putin lose?

“There’s fear. And that feeling I experienced in 1991, 1993—there were similar feelings. It’s not a logical conclusion, it’s not analysis. It’s pure feeling, and I think that if it continues, that shaking will turn into an earthquake.”

I begin my trip in Tallinn, Estonia, at the Lennart Meri Security Conference, which focuses on Russia and the Baltic region, and which I’ve attended for a number of years.

A year ago  35 people would be from Russia. Now it’s 30 or 35 are 

Russia. It’s like vice versa. We had to relocate all the people.

I sit down with Roman Dobrokhotov, the brash editor of 

, an online investigative newspaper now based in Riga, Latvia. “Our journalists are working from Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, Portugal, Britain, America by the way, and in almost all European and Western countries we have at least one person.”

, along with the investigative team Bellingcat, has produced a number of jaw-dropping investigations of Russian security services. In cooperation with Bellingcat, the German news site Der Spiegel, and CNN, 

 uncovered travel and communication data implicating the Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who is currently serving time in a Russian maximum-security prison colony on trumped-up charges.

“We used to have most of our team in Russia,” Dobrokhotov tells me in fast-clipped and fluent English. “A year ago, I would say that, like, from 35 people would be from Russia. Now it’s 30 or 35 are 

Russia. It’s like vice versa, so we had to relocate all the people.”

“Now I understand that this war against journalism that Putin started a year ago—arresting journalists and labeling them ‘foreign agents,’ or ‘undesirable organizations,’ and when FSB were making searches in apartments of journalists—all of it was preparation for war in Ukraine.” Putin, Dobrokhotov claims, “understood he has no resources, both to control the situation inside, and wage war at the same time.”

“There were hundreds of criminal cases against activists, and most of them had to leave Russia,” he went on. “The FSB came to our apartment. They broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, they took all my computers, cell phones, and also documents and my passport, so they didn’t want me to leave the country. I think they understood that if I am inside the country, under some investigation, it could be too dangerous for me to write something. But I still escaped from the country, through the forest.”

People he’s met in the United States and in Europe, Dobrokhotov says, often are surprised that Russians can do investigative journalism like his. “People were absolutely sure that Russia is like North Korea; . . . but no, last summer, it was a country full of journalists, including investigative journalists, who were brave enough to publish whatever they want.”

Dobrokhotov, who is 38, says he began in “old school journalism” around 2005. Now, “we have a totally new journalism,” he continues. “Now, investigative journalists are a bunch of young people with laptops who don’t have a lot of sources, or no sources at all, but who can use open sources of intelligence, who can understand how databases work, who can navigate the black market of data. That is especially relevant for Russia, where we have all kinds of data about each person, like everything you do is in some police database, and that’s why you can penetrate this database and for 10 bucks, buy everything about everyone, including FSB agents.”

“Everyone has social networks, everyone uses a cell phone, . . . everyone flies on a plane or buys tickets to a train, has the internet—so everyone has a digital trace. Even Putin has a digital trace, because he’s flying on special governmental planes and you can trace those planes.”

But what if you’re not in Russia? What if you have fled to another country, I ask?

“Now, in the modern digital world,” he says, “you get so much information from social networks, from different sources, that you don’t usually need to witness it personally.”

Back in Vilnius, at another conference on Russian affairs, I raise that opinion with Yevgeniya Albats, one of Russia’s most experienced investigative journalists, chief editor of 

, a former program host on Echo Moscow radio, and author of a seminal book on the KGB. She nearly explodes.

“That’s the big problem. The journalists left!”

Albats has not fled Russia. She remains defiantly in her hometown of Moscow. When I mention another reporter who fled Moscow, she growls: “I’m in Moscow and he’s not.”

Albats believes in being on the ground, close to the action, able to talk with sources. “You no longer can call somebody and say: ‘Can you give me a comment?’ I know for sure that no one speaks over the phone anymore. Just no one! You have to meet with people in person; . . . they’re afraid, and they meet with you in a very constrained environment, you know? You’re not supposed to be seen with them, you meet with them in the parks, in the entrance buildings, in the closed clubs, so that no one will see that you entered the same room.”

Why does she remain in Moscow? It’s simple, she says: “Because somebody 

. Because it’s a shame. It’s a shame. My country, Jill, I’m a citizen of the Russian Federation. My country started the war of attrition, the war of choice, the war of conquest, against another country. We are journalists, our job is to cover this.”

If she weren’t in Moscow, Albats says, she would be in Ukraine, reporting on the war, but she had knee replacement surgery five days before the invasion, and ruefully acknowledges she’s not up to the physical rigors of combat-zone reporting. “OK, you’re afraid to be in the country, you’re afraid that, you know, tomorrow the KGB guys are going to enter your apartment and catch you. Then go to Ukraine!” 

In 2014, Albats’s foundation was the third in Russia declared a “foreign agent” and she was forced to pay large fines to the government. She’s had encounters with security officials, she says, “I keep a bag with all, you know, clothing prepared if they come after me. So, it’s not pleasant.”

She quotes a colleague who has met with and interviewed Putin many times: “Putin basically explained to him that, you know, also in his judo culture, there are real enemies. You fight with them, but you respect them. You’re supposed to respect your real enemy. However, traitors, you just kill them. They’re traitors; . . . and he is using this word all the time: ‘Traitor.’”

In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, waves of Russians fled to Europe, to China, to the United States, with the journalists and writers among them setting up Russian-language newspapers and publications. With time, however, they lost touch with what was actually happening back in Russia. Their publications were printed on paper, and were difficult to ship back to Moscow, so they were read, for the most part, by fellow Russian exiles.

Today, whether they left after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea or after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they can continue to be “part of the conversation” thanks to online media. If the Kremlin blocks your website—so far, at least—there are VPNs (virtual private networks) to help navigate restrictions, and access information and media outlets outside Russia.

Roman Dobrokhotov says the demand for information is “very high,” even among people without a higher education living in Russia’s regions.

“But we also have a bubble of people, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, who are very loyal to the government. Most of them are elder people from the regions, and they are really zombies, so when you speak with these people, they sound like people from some religious sect who can’t even question their ideas.”

He gives an example: “A woman in Ukraine sitting in a shelter calling her mother in Crimea saying, ‘We are being bombed.’ Mother answers: ‘You are lying to me! That is false, you are brainwashed, please don’t call me again.’ This is a massive phenomenon, . . . so we don’t try to persuade these people because we understand that this is not our job. This is a job for, like, a psychiatrist. . . . We are working for the other 70 percent of Russians, which is more than enough.”

I’m sitting on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, with Kirill Martynov, editor-in-chief of the new media outlet 

. He’s also an academic, a philosopher. A woman walks by and waves. For a relatively big city, Riga seems like a small town for the Russian journalists who have found respite here.

He’s been in Riga since the war began. “It’s funny to me,” he says, “because I have to take care of my journalists and I don’t have . . . any time to find any solutions for me, so I’m still a tourist. . . . I’m also trying to get permanent status here.” The Latvian government has been helpful, he tells me: “They understand pretty well who we are and what kind of work we did in Russia and why we are here, so it’s much easier.” He never wanted to go abroad, he explains, but he made the best decision for himself and “to save professional dignity.”

 sounds familiar, it is probably because of what happened to the publication and its long-time editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, in 2021. On April 7 this year, aboard a train, he was splashed with caustic red paint, apparently in retaliation for his website’s coverage of the Ukraine war. The week before, he had suspended the website and its social media accounts “until the end of the war in Ukraine,” after the government’s media controller issued two back-to-back warnings. It was, Martynov says, was “like a message from the mafia.” In June, Muratov auctioned off his Nobel Prize and will give the 

“We worked [in Moscow] for more than a month after the war began,” he says, “and while we can’t provide any journalism in Russia anymore, we just decided to save the team, and to find some ways to provide information back to Russia.”

 was born. Its staff is made up of journalists from the original 

, but it has no legal connection to that entity. That fact, however, did not stop the Russian government from blocking its website within nine days of its launch.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic helped prepare the team in Moscow for working virtually. In early March, Martynov ended up working from Europe for a few weeks and, he says, “It was quite easy, really, just to meet your team on Zoom and discuss some issues.”

That’s something Vladimir Putin doesn’t understand, he says. “Putin was raised like a Soviet person and he strongly believes if you have very centralized, very expensive TV, that means you control everything. That’s why they’re shelling TV stations in Ukraine, for example. ‘If Ukrainians don’t have their TV, that means that we can control it easily.’”

Journalists who are still in Russia are under colossal pressure, and are being chased out of the country.

“Putin personally, he is like a person who never used a smart phone and never probably was online and never understand how it works. . . . If you invade a country with 40 million people, there are 40 million people, all of them just have smart phones and after that, you know, it’s a moral and media disaster. Because 40 million smart phones just, you know, record all that happens.”

The fact that he was prevented by law from using any information about the war that did not come from the Russian military made it impossible to report honestly about the conflict. There was a huge discussion in the Moscow newsroom, he says, about whether they should stop publishing immediately. So, they asked their subscribers—more than 90 percent of them said they had to continue.

 was March 28 and included reports about the Russian army, the consequences of war, the humanitarian crisis, the economic situation, and some human interest stories. “Millions of Russians read it,” Martynov tells me, so it was still a good decision, you know, to pretend to live with this wartime censorship. After that, it was really over.”

Why is Putin allowing some of the best-known and respected journalists to leave Russia? Martynov thinks it’s part of political theory: “Because if they don’t have all of us in Russia, . . . we don’t provide a lot of pressure inside. If you let all people who are strongly against this war, just let them go, . . . yeah, then everyone supports it!”

Sitting with Martynov in a Riga park, I sense that he sees a deeper meaning in his flight from Russia. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics for 13 years, and his passion is political philosophy. He was fired two years ago.

“They wrote me that, you know, ‘Professor Martynov, don’t you want to delete this publication on your Facebook about President Putin? It would be so nice from you!’”

This, he says, gives Russians forced into exile common cause with citizens of other countries in the region forced to flee their homeland.

“I think that we can try to be a kind of pro-European Russian newspaper in Europe because there are a lot of people who understand Russian here, they are interested in Russian affairs and the future of Eastern Europe, and they don’t have any real mainstream media. They are Belarusians, and Russians, and some Ukrainians. We don’t want to teach these people anything, we just want to be a voice for them, and we want to be a newspaper which provides this kind of liberal and human rights values, about Russia, and in the Russian language.”

At the security conference in Tallinn, I meet Anton Barbashin, founder of 

, what he describes as an “online think tank.” He and his wife Olga launched the site together with a Polish think tank in 2015 and have since lived in Europe. In 2018, they launched Riddle independently from Vilnius. It publishes in both Russian and English.

People who write for Riddle, he says, can be anywhere in the world. “It really doesn’t matter where they decide they want to spend time to be there informationally. And I know a lot of people that are now based in some of the European capitals, informationally they remain in Russia, . . . [but] they are not bound by Russian limitations. They can analyze information as fully as they need, they can—you know—call things as they are.”

But when someone outside of Russia makes a political statement, he says, “Then it gets a little tricky; . . . most people inside the country could be skeptical of political claims or demands that come from Russians from the outside.”

Without a doubt, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has sharpened the political debate.

“A lot of people in Russia already understand that there is no going further with Putin for Russia,” Barbashin says. “Putin started this war and he and a very small group of people made the call. We can speak about the collective responsibility of Russian society, that’s all there, but there is a group of people that are actually guilty.”

“What we’re seeing now, essentially, is kind of the continued collapse of the Soviet Union,” he says. “It’s not about NATO, it’s not about anything, it’s just Russia’s not being able to part with its empire.”

The Russian government, and its state-controlled media, he says, are scaring Russians, trying to convince them that if Russia loses the war in Ukraine, the West will treat them as “second-class people.” But a lot of Russians, he believes, want to see Russia as part of the world: “We don’t have to call it the West, we don’t have to call it the European Union, whatever, I mean, we could call it “Global North,” just a good, decent relationship with good economic cooperation, open borders, and so forth, the open society, right? But what it would cost? What would be the terms?”

Russians need a “beacon of hope,” he believes. “Thinking long term, Russian political figures, whether it’s opposition from within, or from the outside, they could propose a vision to the Russians that, look, if we part with Putin and his legacy, there’s this that we could aspire to.”

“We’ve had this experience already before, that if Russia is left alone, and is not given a hand, it might [be] going down a very bad path. I think, honestly, if we’re kind of just rational about it, it’s not in the interest of the US, or the EU, or Russia itself to kind of let Russia run loose and walk on the path of disintegration. That could create ripple effects all over Eurasia that are much worse than what we are seeing now in Ukraine.”

None of the journalists I spoke with know what will happen next. All of them intend to return to Russia, but they can’t say when. What this means for their profession, and for them personally, is unclear.

, a long-time journalist, publisher, and political commentator now living in Greece. He says many of Russia’s journalists are now in a “professional crisis.”

Jill Dougherty