‘Everyone understands Moscow doesn’t care’: Inside the only uncensored news outlet in Russia’s war-torn border regions
For two weeks now, Russia’s Belgorod region has been grappling with an energy crisis so intense that even Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has called it “catastrophic.” After a Ukrainian attack on January 8, approximately 600,000 people were left without electricity, and repairs to the power grid are ongoing. Yet in most local media, news of the blackout is buried under reports about minor, unrelated events. The only Belgorod-based outlet offering uncensored coverage of the full-scale war and its consequences in the region is Pepel (“Ash”), a Telegram channel launched in fall 2022 that now has more than 107,000 followers.
Against the backdrop of the energy crisis, the Russian authorities have branded Pepel’s journalists “enemies,” accusing them of “stoking panic” and vowing to investigate all “enemy channels.” Meduza spoke with Pepel’s editor-in-chief, Nikita Parmenov, about the challenges of his work and how his readers feel about the war. Parmenov himself and several other members of the editorial team live outside Russia, but many Pepel staffers remain in the country.
— After a Ukrainian strike on January 8, Russia’s Belgorod region experienced a blackout. Even Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov called the situation “catastrophic.” Did you expect something like this to happen?
— Of course not. At the start of the war, it was impossible to imagine that Belgorod would end up in a total blackout. Nobody imagined having a generator running in their yard, or their parents being left without power and water. Even before the war, I remember driving to visit friends who lived near the border, and seeing tanks in the forests, soldiers walking around. On TV they talked about “exercises.” You could see preparations for an invasion, but I guess that’s how the human brain works: you still can’t bring yourself to believe it.
On February 23, 2022, we were celebrating a friend’s birthday. We were smoking on the balcony, and I kept telling everyone: you’re out of your minds, there won’t be a war, Putin wouldn’t dare. On February 24, it turned out I was completely wrong. And I think it was the same for most people in the region. In 2022, we couldn’t even imagine that in 2023 there would be missile strikes on the city center, that the border areas would be monitored by drones, that Belgorod itself would be attacked by UAVs, that your mother wouldn’t be able to leave the house because of the drones, that your parents’ car would burn down after an attack, and so on. And of course, you never thought this war could reach the point where the two sides would be systematically destroying each other’s energy infrastructure.
— What’s the situation in Belgorod now?
— Gladkov has acknowledged that the energy infrastructure has been destroyed and that power substations in Belgorod are no longer functioning. I think that’s very close to the truth. There’s always the possibility that the authorities are saying this deliberately, so that the Ukrainian military won’t strike substations again. But we can see that factories are shutting down, shopping malls are being disconnected from the grid. Right now, heat, electricity, and water are available only in buildings and institutions that are powered by generators. But no one knows how long that can last — especially in winter.
Belgorod is very spread out, with many people living in single-family homes around the city. Everyone has to buy generators themselves, and many haven’t been able to do that. Gladkov simply cannot supply generators to the private sector — that’s thousands of households. There’s no money for it: the budget can’t cover it, and there are no outside funds either.
But water deliveries could have been organized. The authorities didn’t do that. It’s obvious: when the power goes out, pumping stations shut down as well. That means people lose running water in their homes.
At the same time, as far as I understand, local state-controlled media were instructed not to write anything — neither about people being without electricity nor about power being restored in some areas. Perhaps this was justified on security grounds. But the entire city is without power now. There’s no water, and only a handful of people are writing about it. Thousands of messages came into Pepel’s Telegram bot saying there was no water. Meanwhile, local media limited themselves to a single vague post claiming that water had only disappeared somewhere in the northern part of the city.
When the blackout began, several people wrote to us saying they were ready to deliver water. Someone said they would go door to door in their apartment building, asking elderly residents whether they needed help. With no electricity, elevators in high-rise buildings stopped working, leaving people with limited mobility on upper floors effectively trapped.
Until January 12, we waited for the municipal water utility to restore water across the city — but it misled residents. At that point, we at Pepel decided to connect those who needed water with those who were willing to deliver it. By morning, we had processed 500 requests. People were extremely engaged. It became a real story of mutual aid — and a serious blow to public trust in the authorities who failed to organize water deliveries. And we, a group of journalists based in Tbilisi, managed to connect hundreds of people who then spent the night bringing water to one another.
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— You launched Pepel in 2022. Where did the idea come from?
— In August 2022, I went to Tbilisi to open bank accounts. At the time, I was deputy editor-in-chief at the Belgorod outlet Fonar. In September, mobilization began, and my younger brother was still in Russia. I was terrified they would draft him. I remember sitting in a hotel in Tbilisi and writing a terrible post on my personal Telegram channel, basically calling on people to go out into the streets. The post has long since been deleted, but I admit that I was urging people to resist — because I was in a state of panic that they would come for my brother. I was fired.
After that, a series of personal events made me realize that there was nothing for me to return to in Belgorod. I had been dismissed from an outlet that was trying, however unsteadily, to comply with censorship. Where was I supposed to go? And would I be willing to accept censorship anywhere else?
So together with other journalists from Belgorod, we decided to launch Pepel — to give people a publication without censorship. We wanted to create a platform where journalists could speak openly and write freely.
— How many people are on your team?
There are two Pepels. The Belgorod edition launched on November 3, 2022. A year and a half later, on August 6, 2024, we launched Pepel Kursk. I can’t give exact numbers, because the people working with Pepel are in Russia, and we don’t want them to be identified. But across both editorial teams, it’s no more than 15 people.
— How do you make money right now?
We have a few partners; we help independent media get unique reporting from our regions. Occasionally we run ads from outside Russia. But the main source is grants — there simply aren’t any other real ways to earn money.
From time to time, things fall through. I remember that in February 2025 I borrowed money from a friend just to pay people’s salaries for a month. Then the situation stabilized, and things have been fine ever since.
This year, we want to launch Pepel outlets in Bryansk and Voronezh. Maybe elsewhere too — it all depends on whether we can meet our financial obligations. Our priority is to cover the border regions. In Bryansk, the media situation is catastrophic: there’s essentially nothing there, like a dead forest. Voronezh is a bit better, but even there people are asking for a new outlet.
There’s also the idea of covering the entire Black Earth region. Even if we write less about the war and more about local issues, no one will complain.
— Over the past year, the Belgorod edition of Pepel has grown to 107,000 subscribers, gaining more than 70,000 new readers. What drove that growth?
— The growth didn’t really happen over the past year — it started in the fall of 2025. That’s when the Belgorod regional authorities decided to impose total wartime censorship, after the city came under attack by Dart drones — lightweight UAVs that cause relatively limited damage. But there were a lot of them, and many exploded and crashed into buildings.
At the same time, there were strikes on gas stations, fuel trucks, and so on. In other words, the region was under constant drone attack, from morning until night. It was hell. Everything is on fire, you can’t go outside, pickup trucks with mounted machine guns are driving through the city trying to shoot the drones down. It felt like Somalia — in the worst possible sense.
And at that moment, the authorities decided it would be a good idea to introduce total wartime censorship. I don’t think this was the governor’s own idea — most likely it came down from above. Local media, as well as ordinary residents, were effectively banned, under threat of fines, from writing about impact sites, the consequences of strikes, and so on. As a result, we saw a drop-off: people simply stopped sending us information. Drones were flying over the city, and we could tell something was burning or exploding — but we had no concrete information at all.
That’s when we made a public statement saying we would not comply with censorship, that we would report openly on everything, and that we would pay the fines for anyone who was fined for publishing this kind of information.
— How do Belgorod’s media outlets operate now? Do you stay in touch with colleagues from censored outlets?
I don’t have friendly relationships with the heads of those outlets anymore — I’ve fallen out with all of them. Because even though we say “you’re not allowed to write certain things,” someone isn’t literally holding a gun to your head, but they nonetheless sometimes publish truly monstrous stories. For example, you can’t run a video where it’s clearly visible that a Russian air-defense missile is falling on a residential area and then, following the governor, claim it was Ukrainian. You know perfectly well what you’re publishing. And there are hundreds of situations like that. So I don’t maintain informal contacts with editors-in-chief, though there are individual journalists I stay in touch with. You can find sane people everywhere — but they’re all in a kind of frozen state.
As I see it, the local media scene is collapsing. Before the war, the Belgorod region was extremely well developed in media terms. The local journalism school produced a huge number of strong, talented reporters. Now Belgorod is turning into an absolutely awful provincial swamp. You can’t write about anything. What’s happening is negative selection — the degradation of an entire layer of media that existed before the war.
— Pepel reports on attacks not only in Russian regions, but also in Ukraine. How do readers react to that?
— Yes, we do, and that’s a matter of principle for us. We’re not a regional outlet. We’re a media project about the war in the border regions. Pepel in Kursk is about Kursk and Sumy; Pepel in Belgorod is about Belgorod and Kharkiv. Missiles don’t come out of nowhere, and they always land somewhere. If you read news that the Russian army struck a power plant in Kharkiv, you can expect that by evening there will be a missile strike on a power plant in Belgorod. But if you don’t see the shelling of Kharkiv, you start thinking: what inhumane people these Ukrainians are — they want me to have no heat at home. That’s exactly the picture Vladimir Putin wants to create.
Subscribers sometimes write to us asking why we talk about Kharkiv at all. And we tell them: these things are interconnected. Usually people respond reasonably; an insignificant number unsubscribe.
In general, understanding that a missile is flying toward you because Putin started this war is part of a very difficult process of reflection — one that leads to stable anti-war views. Shelling doesn’t allow people to develop that reflection. It only intensifies mutual hatred. We’re trying to change that.
— Pepel has reported on looting in the border regions. How serious is the problem?
— Looters have been active in the border areas since the very beginning of the war. We don’t really know the full scale [of it], because if military police come to us for information, they never report back on whether anyone was caught. But overall, we assume the situation is severe.
Given what the Russian army’s ranks consist of — convicts, repeat offenders, murderers, thieves, people without values or morals — if they enter a village, it will be looted. In the Kursk region, this happened when the Russian army entered the settlements of Glushkovo and Tyotkino in 2024. The key thing was that people had left security cameras running in pickup points, shops, and other places. They were shocked to see that the army was simply robbing them instead of defending Kursk Region. In Belgorod Region, there are fewer cameras in private residential areas, but houses there continue to be looted too. Local residents constantly talk about it. And if a settlement has been evacuated, you can be sure it’s been stripped down to the foundations.
— How have people’s moods in the region changed over the past four years?
— People are unbelievably tired of the war. No matter who I talk to — even well outside my own bubble — everyone wants it to end, on any terms. Trump’s plan, Zelensky’s plan, Putin’s plan — people are ready to accept anything.
At the start of the war there was a wave of patriotic frenzy. I still remember the time when people hung “Z” flags from their windows and slapped “Z” stickers on their cars. Back then, half of Belgorod was driving around with Zs, while the other half was crying over the Barabashovo market in Kharkiv — where they’d spent half their lives — burning down after a missile strike. I remember stepping outside one day and seeing a Z-branded car in my courtyard with its tires slashed. Clearly, some kind soul had stopped by to make a point.
That rotting, state-sold PR is still around: “We must unite,” “We are Russia’s shield,” all that nonsense. In the border areas — in Shebekino or Novaya Tavolzhanka — people really are tightly knit, but not because they’re some kind of “shield of Russia.” It’s because they have no choice but to help one another. They put out fires at their neighbors’ houses, warn each other over walkie-talkies, give people rides to the shop or to work. Lives depend on it: today it’s your house on fire, tomorrow it’s your neighbor’s — and if you don’t help each other, you’ll simply burn alive in your homes. The farther you get from the border, the faster that mutual aid dissolves. Everyone retreats into their own problems.
That said, the recent water outage — when we were flooded with messages from people offering to drive water around at night — showed that solidarity and helping your neighbor definitely still exist.
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— Is there resentment in the region toward Moscow, which seems not to think about the border areas at all?
— There was resentment in 2022–2023, when Channel One couldn’t even pronounce “Shebekino,” calling it “Shemyakino” or something like that. That really set people off. Residents of Shebekino organized online protests, bombarding Channel One’s social media with messages saying, “Shebekino is Russia.” In 2023, the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov came to Belgorod and blurted out something stupid along the lines of, “It’s your own fault, defend yourselves,” that sort of thing. It sparked outright rage. People were furious. It was perceived as: “Some asshole from Moscow said something stupid about Belgorod.”
Now, though, people feel apathetic. Everyone understands Moscow doesn’t care. Drones over Belgorod are Belgorod residents’ problem, just like power outages. People are focused purely on survival: getting to work without a drone hitting you, finding a way to charge your phone during a blackout, buying water. It feels like not a single person in Belgorod believes Moscow can help in any meaningful way.
Interview by Yulia Orlova