Nikita Tsitsagi was an anti-war protester reporting in occupied Ukraine for a Kremlin-funded outlet. His death sparked a fierce debate about wartime journalism.
Nikita Tsitsagi was born in New Jersey, grew up in Moscow, and died from a drone strike near the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar while trying to report from a monastery at the front line. The 29-year-old was not a public figure, and immediately after his death, it became clear that both many independent journalists and many pro-Kremlin “war correspondents” considered him “one of their own.” Some of these people have praised him as a talented anti-war reporter; others as a brave and compassionate friend. At the same time, the fact that Russian propagandists were eulogizing Tsitsagi raised suspicions among opposition figures about his loyalties and ethical compromises. Journalists from the independent outlet Holod did their best to piece together the life story of Tsitsagi, who took part in anti-war protests and criticized the Russian authorities but also worked for Russia’s censored state media outlets and even provided assistance to Russian soldiers. Meduza shares an abridged English-language version of their report.
Nikita Tsitsagi was an anomalous figure in post-2022 Russian journalism: a regular contributor to exiled independent news sites and a winner of the prestigious Redkollegia journalism award, he was also on staff at the Kremlin-controlled outlet News.ru and, until his death this summer, frequently reported from Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Tsitsagi was born in 1995 in the U.S. state of New Jersey; his parents had traveled there so that their son could have American citizenship. According to his girlfriend Veronika, however, Nikita didn’t live in the U.S. for long, and he “never felt like an American.”
A voracious reader his entire life, Tsitsagi loved Jack London as a child and later became a fan of Hunter S. Thompson and Andrey Platonov, the Soviet-Russian writer who, among other things, worked as a war correspondent in World War II.
Tsitsagi began writing for the public in 2017, when he started a page on the Russian social media site VKontakte. He initially posted poems and photos he had taken, but over time, he began experimenting with more journalistic photo series and articles. In one early post, he wrote about the funeral of his grandmother, who had grown up in a German-occupied village during the war.
Eventually, Tsitsagi began publishing freelance articles in official news outlets, from little-known sites to well-known publications like Colta.ru. The topics of his stories ranged from underground dogfighting to archeological looting to human trafficking.
In 2020, during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Tsitsagi traveled to Armenia, where he wrote pieces about refugees in Yerevan and citizens’ reactions to the ceasefire agreement for the site Voennoye Obozreniye. Afterwards, he complained about the outlet’s editor on social media, writing: “The Kremlin-loving editor changed the text in some spots to make it sound better for the Azeris.”
In late 2021, though he didn’t have a journalism degree, Tsitsagi was offered a steady job at News.ru. At the time, according to Veronika, the site appeared to be a “small, neutral outlet” where he would have the chance to exercise some creativity. According to the publication’s economics editor, Vladimir Kheifets, Tsitsagi would regularly pitch stories about the “problems facing ordinary people.” Another colleague told Holod that Nikita was “clearly a person for whom journalism was not just a job but a mission.”
When Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, Tsitsagi was in Moscow. He was “stunned” by the invasion, Veronika told Holod, and he went to an anti-war protest on the evening of February 24. “It was important to him to be with people who weren’t indifferent,” she told Holod. He later wrote on Instagram that there was a “Russia-sized hole in [his] heart.”
‘The human sadness eclipsed everything else’
Though his U.S. citizenship and his numerous relatives in Georgia meant he could easily have left the country, Tsitsagi chose to stay. On March 9, Radio Svoboda published an article he had written about young Russians who had signed army contracts shortly before the full-scale invasion and who were now in Ukrainian captivity. When he posted a link to the story online, he wrote that the existence of the young soldiers in the piece “is denied by the Russian authorities, who call them fake news, but they really do exist.”
After visiting the hometown of one of the captive soldiers for a follow-up article, Tsitsagi decided to go see the war himself. According to one of his friends, Tsitsagi realized that he could reach the front via the same path taken by Russian conscripts: through Volgograd to the Russian-occupied Donetsk region.
“I already knew that I needed to be there — that I needed to reach Mariupol, see what was happening there, and talk about it, document it,” he said in a 2023 interview.
When News.ru refused to publish a story, Tsitsagi would send it to the independent outlet Discourse, where he had a series called “Donbas Diary.”
“I think he wanted to speak freely and without censorship about what he was seeing with his own eyes — the kinds of people he was meeting there and what they had been through,” one editor at Discourse told Holod. “I think he wanted to be a kind of conduit — to simply relay the direct words of the people he encountered in trenches, basements, and bombed-out courtyards. These vivid snapshots would allow the reader to form their own perspective without being influenced by the author’s position.”
Tsitsagi’s experiences in the occupied Donbas only strengthened his anti-war views, his friend Anastasia told Holod. “He said, ‘I realize that the DNR is the most important place in the world right now — I can’t just sit in Moscow,’” she recalled. According to her, “the human sadness that he encountered eclipsed absolutely everything else.”
At the same time, Tsitsagi was critical of the idea that all Russians are to blame for the war. “It would be more productive to think about the collective responsibility of people in the government,” he said in 2023. “So far, I’ve seen them stay completely outside of the realm of accountability. Nothing has hit their homes, their sons are nowhere to be seen, their wives aren’t experiencing any hardships, and their wallets aren’t getting any thinner.”
‘What are we going to do in a different country?’
In July 2023, Tsitsagi won the Redkollegia award, a prestigious prize recognizing independent Russian journalism, for an article about Shebekino, a town in Russia’s Belgorod region that’s regularly come under shelling from Ukraine in recent years. He’d published the article in the independent outlet Novaya Vkladka; meanwhile, he continued to live in Russia and work for the Kremlin-supported News.ru.
In the spring of 2022, when Italian-Swiss Journalist Luca Steinmann had his work permit revoked by the Russian authorities, Tsitsagi risked his own safety and accreditation to help Steinmann report from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Steinmann later wrote that Tsitsagi wasn’t afraid to travel to the most dangerous parts of the conflict zone to find “deep stories through which he could explain the full complexity of this war,” and that he helped others do the same.
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According to Steinmann, Tsitsagi proposed going to Mariupol and trying to reach the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which was under siege by Russian forces:
After making our way through the rubble, we found ourselves in areas controlled by the Ukrainians, and we started taking photos. A few minutes later, we stumbled upon a group of Russian soldiers who were accompanying two TASS correspondents. They had been promised that they would reach the frontline positions before anybody else. They were led by the same colonel’s lackey with whom I’d [previously] butted heads. I remember his stunned, furious face when he saw us, especially when he realized that I, a foreigner without press credentials who was hated by the authorities, had made it to the front before their official correspondents.
After going to the war zone once, Tsitsagi didn’t want to stop; in total, Holod calculated, he spent over a year at the front. According to Anastasia, he said that he wanted to be “at the place where life was happening,” even if that life was “on the edge of death.”
“This guy, in order to work in Donetsk, rented an apartment in a very dangerous part of the city, one that I personally was afraid to go to,” said Kommersant reporter Alexander Chernykh. “When he first moved in there, he sent me a photo and said, ‘Look at this — the glass in my windows is covered in tape.’ That was because the glass was full of holes from flying shrapnel.”
Living in such a dangerous area, according to Chernykh, was the only way Tsitsagi could afford an apartment in the city. Once, Tsitsagi described on Instagram how a Grad rocket had hit a neighboring street while he was talking on the phone outside his building. He said a hot piece of shrapnel had landed right next to him — and burned his hand when he picked it up.
Tsitsagi’s reporting trips to Donetsk usually lasted from several weeks to two months. After returning to Moscow, he often traveled to Russia’s regions to write about civilian life there. In November 2023, a story he wrote about the millions of flies plaguing Russia’s Chelyabinsk region was nominated for the Profession — Journalist award, another independent journalism prize.
Tsitsagi wanted to travel to Berlin for the award ceremony in February 2024 and even discussed meeting up there with his girlfriend Veronika, who had emigrated to Berlin in the fall of 2022. After Novaya Vkladka’s editors spoke to him about the risks, however, he changed his mind: attending an event alongside people declared “foreign agents” and “undesirable” by the Kremlin could threaten his ability to keep reporting from Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine.
According to Veronika, living and working in Russia was extremely important to Tsitsagi. “He basically saw his work as being in Russian specifically. He loved Russia. He didn’t love the authorities, he didn’t love the criminal activity — it wasn’t about those things. He loved Russian people. He would say that he wanted to raise his children in Russia and wanted them to speak Russian,” she recounted.
Tsitsagi also wanted Veronika to return to Russia. “He would say, ‘I think you and I will only be happy if we’re in Russia. What are we going to do in a different country? I won’t be able to fully do my work. The journalists who have left can write things, but you can feel that they’re isolated from what’s really happening.’”
Compromises
“He was never a Putin supporter, but he also wasn’t a radical oppositionist,” Tsitsagi’s friend Fyodor Otroshchenko told Holod.
According to Anastasia, Tsitsagi was under no illusions about the fact that his workplace, News.ru, cooperated with state censors. “So you can’t call him an absolute liberal, because he understood everything, but he continued to exist under these conditions. He adapted to them and tried to do everything as honestly as he could,” she told Holod.
One time, Anastasia said, she and Nikita discussed whether he would ever work at “especially censored places like Russia Today.” According to her, he said that he would “never work there” because it would be “too much” and his “conscience wouldn’t allow it.”
Nonetheless, Tsitsagi’s first News.ru articles from Donetsk were short write-ups of quotes from Eduard Basurin, the then-deputy chief of the “people’s militia” of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The reports are straightforwardly propagandistic, with titles like “The enemy is resisting: The first psychological break is Mariupol” and “They deserve the death penalty: Basurin on the fighters of Ukraine’s national battalions.”
In his anonymous dispatches for the outlet Discourse, meanwhile, Tsitsagi wrote the following about Basurin:
Every evening, stern and relentless, he would read aloud on air the list of the dead, the number of shelled houses, and the number of shells fired into the city, describing the enemy’s actions with the same phrases: “The fascists have once again used banned munitions,” “Ukrainian bandit formations are terrorizing the city,” “The republic’s residents are facing this and that.” At the end of the broadcast, he would report the militia’s losses. When the camera was turned off, he muttered through his teeth: “Actually there were many more, but whatever…” The journalists were already packing up their cameras and leaving, but at that moment, it seemed to me that some part of his soul was still alive.
According to those who knew him, Tsitsagi would occasionally have to “fight for literally every line” in his articles. One friend recounts an argument the journalist had with an editor about a report that mentioned a building damaged by both Russian and Ukrainian missiles; because of Moscow’s censorship, it was illegal for Nikita to mention the Russian one. “He had to defend himself, try to rephrase it, and fight to ensure that the truth the [affected civilian] had communicated was preserved in at least some form,” the person said.
Tsitsagi told Otroshchenko that he never manipulated the facts in his reports, but that there were several times when he “teetered on the edge of his conscience” in order to be able to keep working in Russia. As one example, Tsitsagi cited an article he wrote after the death of pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in which he collected memories about Tatarsky from people who knew him.
During his time working at the front, Tsitsagi wrote dozens of articles about volunteers, doctors, people left disabled by the war, the territorial defense forces in Russian border towns, and other people affected by the conflict. At the same time, he wrote numerous stories about Russian soldiers, often in a sympathetic tone and without offering a critical perspective on the military’s actions (which would have been impossible in a censored outlet like News.ru).
According to Alexander Chernykh, Tsitsagi combined his reporting work with attempts to help the people he met in the conflict zone. “You talk about objectivity, but he was transporting food [to Mariupol] and helping evacuate people and animals from there,” Chernykh said. “Today, a colleague and I managed to bring humanitarian aid to the city and evacuate a cat, an older woman, a young woman, and her daughter. Their husbands weren’t rescued,” Tsitsagi wrote on social media on April 2.
Tsitsagi often traveled together with pro-Kremlin bloggers and “war correspondents” and developed friendly relations with them. On one occasion, for example, he and pro-war poet Anna Dolgareva evacuated an elderly woman from Mariupol after her daughter spotted her in a video; the woman said her house had burned down and she had struggled to reach the hospital where they found her.
In November 2023, Tsitsagi published an article about a project called “Nets for Our Own,” in which volunteers made camouflage nets for Russian soldiers. The project’s director told Holod she was surprised by the journalist’s relationship with some of the people he was writing about. “He would come to us looking for [camouflage suits] for scout snipers near Marinka and ponchos [with protection] from thermal imaging cameras,” she recalled. “One [Russian soldier he knew] had just been wounded and was supposed to continue on even after his injury. [Tsitsagi] was getting those suits and ponchos for him. His eyes would shine; he really wanted to help those guys he knew.”
Holod notes that regardless of the consequences and ethical implications of Tsitsagi’s decision to assist Russian soldiers, his actions didn’t change his status as a non-combatant under international humanitarian law, according to Andrei Richter, a professor at Comenius University in Bratislava and the former director of the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.
The last story Tsitsagi published before his death was a photo report about Ukrainian soldiers being held captive on Russian-occupied territory. On June 15, he received a message from the mother of one of the prisoners. According to several people who knew him, Tsitsagi planned to try to help her get in touch with her son. He never got the chance.
‘The road of death’
On the evening of June 15, 2024, Alexander Chernykh invited Nikita Tsitsagi, along with correspondents from RIA Novosti and Lenta.ru, over to his apartment in Donetsk. “[The state media employees] jokingly asked him, ‘So who are you really rooting for — the Reds or the Whites?’” Chernykh recounts. “He laughed and said, ‘I’m rooting for journalism.’”
By this point, Tsitsagi had been in the conflict zone for four months straight — his longest reporting trip yet. At the gathering, he talked about his plan for the following day: he wanted to visit the Nikolo-Vasylivskyi Monastery near Vuhledar, which was located on the front line. He’d been there a year earlier and described it as follows:
The village is cut off from the world, and the people who remain there are hiding in the battered refuge of the monastery. Their [monastic] cells caught fire recently. When we went downstairs, the nuns were singing psalms amid the crackle of burning candles and the sounds of shelling.
Other journalists referred to the road to the monastery as the “road of death” as it was constantly “targeted” by Ukrainian drones. Nonetheless, according to the director of Nets for Our Own, Tsitsagi was “set on going there.” “He wanted to live in that monastery himself,” she recalled. “The monks were living somewhere down in the basements. They’ve tried to evacuate them several times, but they always ran back and returned to the monastery.”
Tsitsagi set off for the monastery the following evening; he knew he had a better chance of avoiding detection by drones if he traveled in the dark. “We couldn’t dissuade him. It seems like we even offended him a bit. Like, ‘What are you lecturing me about? I’ve seen as much of the war as you have,’” Chernykh said.
On June 16, Nikita Tsitsagi was killed by a drone strike near the monastery. Beyond that, little is known about the circumstances of his death: it’s unclear what time he died, who he was with, or whether he had already reached the monastery.
A disputed legacy
Nikita Tsitsagi was not a well-known public figure and largely limited his personal reflections to anonymous social media accounts, hoping to hide how dangerous his reporting was from his loved ones. Few people knew the details of his work or his own views; even his girlfriend, Veronika, didn’t know about his Telegram account until after his death.
As a result, when the numerous people publicly expressing their condolences after Tsitsagi’s death turned out to include not just independent Russian journalists, Western reporters, and the general director of UNESCO but also pro-Kremlin bloggers and even Russian officials, a heated debate broke out on social media: Was Tsitsagi a propaganda-spreading “war correspondent” for Russian state media or a real journalist? And should his Redkollegia award be posthumously revoked?
Russian political blogger Michael Nacke, who’s currently based in Lithuania, was one of the first public voices to express outrage at Tsitsagi’s reception of the award, calling the late journalist an “war correspondent-occupier” and writing that he saw “no reason to mourn [a member of the] information service of Russian troops.” Awarding a monetary prize to Tsitsagi, Nacke argued, was tantamount to financially supporting Russian propaganda.
Leonid Volkov, the former chairman of Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, expressed a similar sentiment on X, writing:
It seems another Z “war correspondent” has died. That’s par for the course in the occupied territories. It’s why you shouldn’t occupy foreign territory. Turns out, though, that he was a “friend of all friends” and someone’s “talented student” — and suddenly everything became less clear-cut… They deserve Putin, of course.
On June 19, 2024, the current Redkollegia jury (different from the one that selected Tsitsagi as a winner) announced that it didn’t plan to revoke Tsitsagi’s award but that the situation required further discussion. “This is our dilemma: it seems impossible today not to take into account the author’s creative path, but neither can we make the decision personal, evaluating not just the specific text, video, or podcast in question but also the author themself,” their statement read.
Russian opposition politician Lev Shlosberg, who still lives in the country, criticized the calls to “deprive a slain journalist of a journalistic prize” as “looting,” saying: “Anyone who delights in someone’s death is showing that they’ve been dehumanized. The level of brutality has reached an absolute extreme.” He added that people who “wouldn’t dare approach the front line” themselves cannot understand what people there are facing and have no right to “judge others, alive or dead, or demand that someone make a moral decision.”
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Commenting on the debate that followed Tsitsagi’s death, Russian journalist and past Redkollegia jury member Dmitry Kolezev told Holod that amid the full-scale war and Russia’s growing domestic repression, the ethical frameworks of “those who left” and “those who stayed” have begun to diverge. In Kolezev’s view, Tsitsagi can’t be placed on the same level as figures like pro-Kremlin TV pundit Dmitry Kiselyov or RIA Novosti “war correspondent” Rostislav Zhuravlev, who fought in the war in Donbas on the side of the self-proclaimed “Luhansk People’s Republic” in 2014 and was killed in Ukraine in July.
“[Zhuravlev] was indeed carrying out purely propagandistic tasks — he was a ‘soldier with a camera and microphone,’ glorifying the war,” Kolezev said. “Tsitsagi worked differently, closer to journalistic standards — although, yes, he collaborated with propaganda outlets, and some of his publications were propagandistic.”
Historian and YouTube blogger Alexander Shtefanov, who visited Ukraine’s occupied territories and made a film about them called “Ordinary Denazification,” said he believes it’s important for journalists to travel there; if they don’t, he explained, the only information coming from the occupied areas will be that which is reported by pro-Kremlin “war correspondents.” “It seems to me that we need some journalists who, at the cost of some self-censorship, continue to stay in Russia and work while it’s still possible,” he told Holod.
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Reporting by Lesya Lapina. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.