Kevin Rothrock’s list of the best investigative reporting on Russia in 2023
Over the past 12 months, there have been countless little miracles, I’m sure. Babies were born. Marriages were celebrated. We even had that Barbenheimer thing. In Russia, all that happened, too (though some cinemas blurred the bit where the two guys smooch Ken on the cheek). But 2023, overall, as the crow flies, was mostly another rotten year for the country that continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine and merciless crackdown on the opposition at home. Before we even got to February, the Prosecutor General’s Office outlawed Meduza as an illegal, “undesirable organization” — a status we now share with journalists at Novaya Gazeta Europe, TV Rain, and other outlets. As a final punishment in the news cycle, the year is closing out with a conservative backlash to a bunch of Moscow celebrities attending a party in their skivvies.
But all that awfulness is no excuse to forget the excellent investigative reporting published in 2023. That this genre of journalism still exists in Russia is no small feat, given that lawmakers have criminalized reporting any information at odds with the Defense Ministry’s official comments. So, as you drop the confetti this Sunday to rid yourselves of 2023, here’s my list of the best investigative reporting on Russia over the year, presented in reverse chronological order. (Due to my own linguistic limitations, this list, warts and all, is restricted to reporting in Russian and English.)
Yours, Kevin Rothrock, Meduza in English managing editor
The Associated Press: “Russia covered up and undercounted true human cost of floodings after dam explosion”
December 28
The Kakhovka Dam collapsed on June 6, 2023, following an incident that Western experts say was likely Moscow’s attempt to hinder the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kherson region. (The Kremlin denies these allegations and blames Kyiv.) The dam’s destruction flooded 230 square miles (600 square kilometers), swallowing up whole towns and settlements along the Dnipro River. Moscow claims that just 59 people drowned in the territory it controls, but an AP investigation found that the Russian authorities “vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead.” In the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky alone, the number is at least in the hundreds. To collect this data, journalists Samya Kullab and Illia Novikov spoke to health workers in Oleshky and to residents who later left the area after witnessing Russia’s efforts to conceal the death toll.
The Insider: “Sanction-dodging armor: Which Western countries are helping Russia make Armata and Proryv tanks”
December 20
Journalist Sergei Ezhov found companies in 11 Western countries still supplying Russia with the equipment and goods necessary to build tanks. We’re talking high-precision grinding machines, rotating pulleys and brackets, polishing powder, and — you know — other tank stuff. All for sale to Russia, even after almost two years of full-scale war in Ukraine. Ezhov also discovered that a major Russian defense contractor obtained British citizenship after February 24, 2022.
The New York Times: “Chinese traders and Moroccan ports: How Russia flouts global tech bans”
December 19
Ports in Morocco and Turkey, specialized e-commerce sites, and “a constellation of middlemen” (especially in China) make it possible for Russia to buy vital U.S. tech components while evading international trade restrictions. Journalists Paul Mozur, Aaron Krolik, and Adam Satariano obtained leaked Russian government emails, trade documents, and records of online conversations between Russian engineers. They learned that Moscow is tapping “neutral countries” like Turkey and Morocco to acquire items like telecom equipment, surveillance gear, microchips, and drones from major manufacturers. These workarounds have helped sustain critical sectors of the economy and kept Russia’s war machine rolling.
The Insider: “Passport intel: How Slutsky’s foundation transfers foreigners’ data to Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate for recruitment”
December 7
Journalist Sergey Kanev obtained and studied emails revealing that the Russian Peace Foundation, which LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky heads, passed information about the organization’s foreign visitors to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, which actively recruits abroad, looking for sympathetic or pliable politicians, military, intelligence officers, scientists, engineers working at defense companies, diplomats, and journalists.
The Bell: “The YouTube killer: Meet Stepan Kovalchuk, the man tasked with transforming Vkontakte into the Internet’s Channel One”
October 10
In September 2023, the Russian technology company VK announced that it was creating two business groups within its corporate structure: one to house the Mail.ru email service, the Rustore app store, VK ID, and VK Pay, while the other division would be home to the social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki and the platforms Zen, VK Video, VK Music, VK Clips, and VK Messenger. The latter group housing all the company’s “content projects” has been placed under the supervision of 29-year-old Stepan Kovalchuk, who is the grandson of Kurchatov Institute President Mikhail Kovalchuk and the grandnephew of banking oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk. Journalists Valery Pozychanyuk and Irina Pankratova revealed how Stepan rose so quickly at VK to find himself developing what could be Russia’s domestic replacement for YouTube.
Dossier Center: “Electrical state secrets: Addresses of intelligence agency and Federal Protective Service offices found in public records”
October 2
Journalist Denis Korotkov discovered publicly available city records on electricity customers and identified addresses with special designations indicating that their power supply should not be disrupted, revealing the classified locations of facilities in Russia’s intelligence community. (If there are ever rolling blackouts in the country, we now know what pinpricks of light will still be visible from the sky.)
Proekt: “Lapdogs of war: A guide to Russia’s wartime oligarchs”
July 31
Journalists Vitaly Soldatskikh, Ekaterina Reznikova, Roman Badanin, and Katya Arenina cataloged how Russia’s quiet or timidly antiwar oligarchs nevertheless own the businesses that fuel Russia’s war machine. Not only do they document it, but they also link the enterprises to specific atrocities in Vinnytsia, Bucha, and Mariupol. The investigation tracks how the richest Russians have received billions of dollars in defense contracts, producing, among other things, the weapons used to kill Ukrainian civilians.
Meduza and Mediazona: “Bring out your dead: The true number of Russian soldiers killed so far in the invasion of Ukraine”
July 10
On December 29, 2023, Mediazona updated its verified tally of Russian KIAs in Ukraine, which it manages with the BBC and a team of volunteer researchers. At the year’s close, the number had reached 40,599. More than five months earlier, a joint study by journalists at Meduza and Mediazona and Tubingen University statistician Dmitry Kobak estimated that roughly 47,000 Russian soldiers had died in the war as of May 2023. The investigation relied on several novel data-triangulation techniques, namely, mortality data from the Federal State Statistics Service and records from the National Probate Registry. The findings are remarkable also because they reveal how the Kremlin has labored to conceal the invasion’s true and growing human cost to Russians themselves.
Meduza: “‘I prayed I wouldn’t be next’: The secretive prisons where Russia hides and tortures Ukrainian civilians”
May 26
Russia has abducted thousands of Ukrainian civilians, from volunteers and journalists to former soldiers and officials, and locked them in Russian prisons. The victims don’t have POW status, they’re not allowed to see their lawyers or loved ones, and most of them are impossible to communicate with from outside. Those who have managed to get out often still don’t know the official reasons for their incarceration or their release. In Simferopol alone, more than 100 civilian hostages (as they’re called by human rights advocates) are currently in captivity. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke with Ukrainians who have been released from the facilities, as well as with their relatives and lawyers, to find out how this clandestine prison system works.
Meduza and The Bell: “Hunting down the haters: How Rostec, the Russian military’s industrial supplier, waged a PR war on Telegram”
April 1
Since the start of the Ukraine invasion, Rostec, the state-held industrial corporation that produces Russia’s Armata and T-90 “Proryv” tanks, has been drawn into an unexpected new kind of warfare: namely, the war on anonymous Telegram channels that dare to criticize the industrial giant and its CEO, the former KGB agent and Putin’s friend Sergey Chemezov. The main beneficiary of this crusade, though, happens to be another figure. Journalists Svetlana Reiter, Irina Pankratova, and Lilia Yapparova uncovered the unlikely story of the rise of Vasily Brovko, the PR manager who went from helping clients make a name for themselves to uncovering the real names of Telegram administrators who would rather stay anonymous.
Proekt: “An investigation on how Vladimir Putin profits from the vices of the Russians”
February 28
In a two-part investigative report, journalists Mikhail Maglov, Roman Badanin, and Sergei Titov revealed new details about an alleged “slush fund” used to finance Vladimir Putin’s lavish private life and the lives of his closest companions, including retired gymnast Alina Kabaeva, the rumored mother of at least three children with Russia’s president. The investigation focuses first on a Cyprus-based company called Ermira Consultants (including how it profits off vodka merchandized with Putin’s name) and then on a palace constructed outside Valdai. Throughout both stories, readers learn about the enormous entourage of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who serve as nominal owners of Putin’s alleged vast wealth.
Dossier Center: “Vladimir Putin transfers to an armored train: The train belongs to a company tied to a friend of the president”
February 13
Now that Putin has “returned to the people” in his glorious re-election campaign, there’s less talk about his physical isolation from others. Still, at the start of the year, echoes of the pandemic and questions about the man’s psychology meant lots of attention on the barriers around the president. Journalist Ilya Rozhdestvensky learned that Putin’s fears of being shot out of the sky by the Ukrainian military drove him to shift most of his domestic travel to an armored train.
Eesti Ekspress, in partnership with OCCRP, IrpiMedia, iStories, and Profil: “Kremlin-Linked Group Arranged Payments to European Politicians to Support Russia’s Annexation of Crimea”
February 3
Journalists Martin Laine, Cecilia Anesi, Lorenzo Bagnoli, and Tatiana Tkachenko studied hacked and leaked emails, learning that a State Duma staffer named Sargis Mirzakhanian built a network that paid European politicians to propose pro-Russian motions in their local legislatures. Mirzakhanian’s group also gave money to right-wing European activists to publish pro-Russian articles and even arranged trips to Crimea for European politicians and businesspeople and brought Europeans to act as election observers.
iStories: “Russian aviation squadron chief says, ‘What, am I the one who pressed the trigger or flew the plane?’”
January 16
On January 14, a Kh-22 cruise missile struck a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine, killing 45 people, including six children. Two days later, the Security Service of Ukraine announced that it had identified the Russian soldiers involved in the missile attack. Hours later, journalists Dmitry Velikovsky, Irina Dolinina, and Alisa Kuznetsova tracked down six of the soldiers named by Kyiv. Two agreed to talk.
List by Kevin Rothrock
Cover photo: Zodyakuz / Shutterstock