 Do you need to do things there? Or can you hold this one? Anna Maria, will you do the countdown when we are live? Me? Yeah. Okay. No, no, no, no. I don't know. Last second producer. No. Re-name, yeah. No, Anna Maria. Anna Maria, can you hear me? Will you do the countdown? Sorry for that, Maria. We can hear you now. I'm trying to give the sound a little bit louder. Okay. Earphones needed. Okay. Yeah, we hear you. Okay. You have to give me a second. Welcome to the museum of movements and freedom talk number three. This time in collaboration with London Bay. Index and censorship. My name is Anna Maria and I'm very happy to introduce her moderator, Sandra Tivison. Sandra is a very experienced moderator, specializing in culture, politics, media and artistic freedom. I will leave the work now to Sandra to introduce her amazing panel for this important discussion. Welcome. Thank you very much, Malme. And hello from Stockholm. And I'm very happy to introduce you to Sandra Tivison. And hello from Stockholm. We have a panel here with us from different parts of the world. I will introduce them, each one. First, we have Maria or John Kiddse. From the... You're working... Justice for journalists. Justice for journalists and you're based in London, but you're from Russia in the beginning. And welcome as well, Mark Freire. You're from Index, an associate editor there. Warm welcome to you as well. Thanks, Sandra. It's good to be here. But like many people, I'm actually out in the countryside at the moment because we're not going into the office. Okay, great. And as well, we have from Nishti Novgorod. We have Alexander Pishguin. Is that correct? Hello. Pishguin. A very warm welcome to you as well. We're so happy to have you here. Hello everybody. Thank you for this opportunity. Just to say as well, you are the journalists who will give us some witnesses from the ground here today. Maria and Mark has been working together on a project, the censorship project, disease control, that they will give us more information about soon. As we all know, we are affected very much during this pandemic time. Since mid-February, Mark and Maria's organization, Justice for Journalists and Index on Censorship, have been working on, because they're so experienced monitoring these kinds of situations. They knew early on that something was going in the wrong way. So they made contact. I have asked the three of you to give some three, four minutes keynote, like a point of view from your position. What has been happening? Why did we have to start monitoring the threats to journalists that we already before knew was so bad? What was going to happen even more in a pandemic situation? Maria, could you please start with giving your history? Thank you very much, Sandra, and thank you very much for inviting Justice for Journalists Foundation to be on this panel. We are a rather new organization. We're just two years old, and we were found after the group of Russian investigative journalists was ambushed and murdered in the Central African Republic. And no official investigation followed. As a result, the foundation deemed its purpose to issue grants for investigation of violent crimes against journalists. As well, we are providing educational resources and courses for journalists to help with their security. And we also, the third kind of big area of our work is monitoring of attacks and violations against media workers in the former Soviet Union. So when index of censorship approached us in mid-March with the idea of monitoring the situation that was unveiling around the COVID-19 and following violations against journalists and the freedom of speech, we thought that it's a brilliant idea because we were already monitoring the situation of violations and we are uniquely positioned with a very large network in this 12 former Soviet Union countries from which we receive daily updates and alerts on various types of attacks on journalists. So we... Excuse me. These countries are, could you tell us? Yeah, 12 former Soviet republics. So these are everything but from Baltic states that are now part of the European Union. So the biggest being, of course, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Armenia, Georgia. So these countries, sorry? Belarus? Belarus, of course, yes, yes, 12 countries. So, yes, so we were monitoring them already and we contacted our network and they happily agreed to monitor all the violations that were taking place in their countries as it was already quite noticeable. And, of course, we will probably speak about the details later on on this roundtable. But the main conclusion that we came up with is that in this unprecedented situation with the pandemic, the autocratic regimes of the Central Asia, of Belarus and Russia, used the pandemics to suppress the free speech. So the goal was not to eliminate the fakes as it was claimed, not to eliminate the false statistic as it was claimed. The goal was to suppress the free speech to ensure that there is no other information coming out about the situation rather than from the official sources. And the official sources were not interested in producing correct information. They were just interested in silencing the truth, unfortunately. So the main two violations that the journalists received were spreading fakes and disinformation. And the second one was just breaking this freshly introduced rules of self-isolation, guaranteeing emergency, et cetera. This was the main finding. And I will let Mark speak about the wider world because this obviously the index of censorship was initially they intended to monitor just Europe. But as they started doing this job, they have received alerts from all over the world. So it became a global project. Okay, thank you, Maria. Mark, let's move towards you. Index organization has been around for a much longer time. Could you give us the context of your organization? Yeah, sure. So index on censorship in 2022 will celebrate its 50th anniversary. So we were set up really to give a voice to censored artists and activists. And we have a very long heritage with the Soviet Union. We were one of the publications that published the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, from captivity there. So that's something that we've been doing for those five decades. Media freedom has been something that we've looked at very carefully over that time in addition to artistic freedom. And what we know is that whenever there's a crisis like the COVID crisis, although many say that's an unprecedented one, authoritarian leaders use that as cover to clamp down both on activists and on journalists. And unfortunately, that's proven to be the case. I think we didn't have a crystal ball. When we started this project, we started discussing it in February. And the reason we were doing it then is because we could already tell that China was not revealing everything that was going on in Wuhan, as was widely covered at the time. And there are those who argue that if they had been more open and they'd allowed journalists and doctors to speak rather than silencing them, then the world wouldn't be in the position that it is today with most of it in lockdown and economies in free fall. Journalists and bloggers having been attacked, detained and in some cases disappeared as has happened in China. And so, as I say, we've seen this in the past. We've worked on media freedom projects in the past where we see authoritarian leaders using these opportunities to clamp down. And so, it was very good to start a collaboration with Maria and JFJ on this. I mean, we had originally thought of targeting just Europe. We weren't sure exactly what we would see in Europe, but it became clear very quickly that there were going to be media freedom restrictions there as well as all around the world. Yes, the former Soviet Union has probably had the most attacks that we've recorded through this project, but they have occurred all through the world. So, I just sort of be useful just to talk a little bit about how we actually did this project. So, my background is really as a... I'm actually a scientist by training. I'm a nuclear physicist back in the 1990s, but I then moved into journalism and technical journalism particularly. So, I have a sort of fairly strong grounding in technology. And one of the things that I've been doing is sort of data journalism over the years. And I've worked for newspapers like The Times and The Sunday Times here in the UK as well as with Index on Censorship. So, it seemed logical to me that we should do an interactive project looking at this and obviously with the nature of it being global, that we should do a global map illustrating some of these incidents. So, the way it worked is we set up a form where people could report their incidents. We obviously have our own team in the UK of staff, but also an extended network of correspondents, just as Maria and JFJ do, that we use on a daily basis, not just on this project, but to inform us of what's going on in the world. So, at the moment, we're hearing from people, not as part of this project, but we're hearing from people in Belarus and the Philippines and all over the world, lots going on right at this moment beyond what's being restricted during COVID. So, it's important to note that the report that we've come out with now, it doesn't represent every attack that's occurred on journalists and bloggers over that time, but we think it's important to verify these incidents. So, whenever we're informed of one by one of our team or network or a reader of the magazine, then we have to investigate that to make sure that it's actually a legitimate report of attack because there's lots of disinformation as we know a lot. And so, that involves looking for independent media sources and witnesses and statements and speaking to the individuals, like Alexander who's on this call with us now. And the way we've dealt with those incidents is we've categorized them in lots of different ways. So, we've categorized them as attacks on journalists. So, whether that's a physical attack, a verbal attack or a mental attack, we've also looked at things like changes in legislation that make it more difficult for the media to report. So, one example of this that we've noted a lot of is restrictions on freedom of information, for example. So, many countries around the world have freedom of information legislation allowing journalists to ask the government what's been going on and what the official response is. And a lot of what's been happening is that that's been very restricted during COVID partly. Some say because it's physically more difficult for those people, the politicians and the authorities to provide this information, but some are using it as a cover to not provide this information because they don't want the official line to come out. And then, the other thing we've noted a lot of as well is, and Maria alluded to this in her introduction as well, is the restriction of reporting to official state journalists as well. And I'm sure Alexander will talk about this as well. So, in many countries, even in the UK, which relatively is free in terms of its media, we've seen restrictions on the questions that people are allowed to ask and who's allowed to ask those questions. In terms of actual incidents, the most common has been detention and arrest. So, people being detained by the police and arrested often on trumped-up charges relating to the states of emergency that often have been introduced around the world. But we've also seen more than 50 physical attacks on journalists as well. I think Donald Trump needs a special mention here. I mean, he hasn't been physically attacking journalists, but his verbal attacks have increased during COVID, as many reporters have challenged him on his handling of the COVID crisis. And the last thing I probably want to say in this introduction is really, you know, this report that we've released today, and you can see that on our website, at indexonscensorship.org slash mediafreedom during COVID and also on the JFJ site. They've produced their newsletter today. So, you can see the copies of that. That report relates to the period up to mid-September when we have reported more than 240 verified incidents around the world. So, you know, what we thought of back in February and March, it's really been borne out by the evidence. This was really a huge problem that was waiting to happen. And we recognize that, obviously, there's a global health crisis going on and that certain individual freedoms need to be restricted. But, you know, it shouldn't extend to media and bloggers because, you know, unless we have open, transparent discussion of this information around the pandemic, how are we going to get through this? How? Yeah. Great. Thank you, Mark. I will get back to you with some questions with what's presented now. But first, Alexander, I want to say hi to you and welcome again. You are just for backdrop information. You are the first journalist in Russia to be put on trial for writing journalism about the COVID with the new law regarding to fake news. They accused you of fake news when you reported on COVID, the pandemic situation. And you're just waiting for information about how the trial has been going these days. Yes, the decision will be, I guess, in mid-November. So, please tell us how do you work and what is your background and give us the context of your situation. I'm working in Nizhny Novgorod. It's quite a big city, east from Moscow, 300 miles east from Moscow over a million habitants. We got a lot of newspapers, TV channels and internet sites, but all of them actually just rewriting the official information about the coronavirus. And it's not a problem for journalists if they just rewrite all the official things. But if you want some exclusive information, you got to be very careful because we got some new articles in the Russian criminal code and the authorities issued that article as a part of preparation for the pandemic. And they say that it needs to prevent panic among people. And right now I got one of these articles and they accuse me in spreading fake news. Although it wasn't news, it was just my personal opinion about the whole situation at the start period of the pandemic. I saw a lot of people gathering in Russian churches on April 12th. That was some kind of traditional Orthodox rituals a week before Russian Orthodox Easter. And we got all the cafes, all the restaurants, all the parks closed at that time and only the churches opened their doors and welcomed people. I was actually very angry because it was completely against all the rules and all the barriers that local officials tried to set to prevent spreading of the coronavirus. So I was disappointed a lot and I just couldn't be silent. I wrote about this situation in all my official resources and after that I just tried to express my emotions to describe this situation in a more emotional way on my anonymous telegram channel. That was a small quote, a small article, but it was maybe a little bit rough, but I just can't hold it inside because I compared all these churches, all these rituals and crowded churches to the planned action of infecting people. Actually that was true because I think it's an exhum because every scientist will tell you that if you got a lot of people in some narrow space you got high risk of spreading the infection far beyond that place. And I must admit that I was right because two weeks after this situation after my article was wrote we got some big source of infection in the largest local Orthodox monastery. It was the town of Divevo and the whole town was set on quarantine and I know I think that that was the direct result of the violation of the epidemiological rules on April 12th, the day I wrote my article. It was emotional, it was maybe rough a little bit, but I must mention that I deleted my article the day after writing because I got a call from FSB, a former KGB organization. They told me to delete it and in a few minutes they called me back again and said, hold on, don't delete, let it exist for a while. So I realized that they had some kind of plan about me and I deleted my text but it didn't help and just in two days later there was a knock on my door, it was a squad of nine people, an investigator, FSB officers, people in camouflage who handcuffed me and scared my pregnant wife and took my phone and my laptop and two months later my case was sent to court. Despite an explanation given by the Supreme Court of Russia back on April 30th, the Supreme Court has explained what kind of news the police can call fake news and they told that it should look a lot like real news, it must include all the quotes, names, documents, possibly fake videos and all that stuff. And none of them was in my article. My article was an emotional point of view but it did not stop the investigators and now I'm in waiting for the court decision. I guess I will be fined by a big sum of money and I must admit that my colleague and my friend Irina Slavina who tragically died on October 2nd here in Nizhny Novgorod also was fined and they accused her of spreading the fake news about the coronavirus but it was a so-called administrative article of Russian administrative court and I'm actually the first journalist with criminal code on me. I don't know what decision to expect but the independent experts said that my article wasn't news, it was a personal opinion. It's very hard to expect how Judge will plead me guilty but I guess I need to save a lot of money right now to be ready. It's a ridiculous situation. As we said in Russia, I need to prove that I'm not a camel. The whole situation here in Russia for journalism is getting darker and darker every month, every day. I find the police searches and all the state of pressure in general it's a huge part of our journalist's life. I'm not an optimist about the near future. If I will plead not guilty I will be very, very... Excuse me, I'm a little bit emotional right now because it's the longest English speech in my life and thank you for this opportunity to tell you about this situation. It's very good. It's not good to have a criminal article or a criminal case on you. What I expected 20 years ago when I decided to be a journalist. Have you been able to work with other journalists during this period since you were accused of this? Yes, I'm trying to work but I need to hold some information because I don't want to be a repeat offender in the authorities eyes. I got some exclusive information about the real situation of the pandemic here in the Nizhny Novgorod region but now I'm trying to hold it inside because it's quite dangerous right now. Because you're waiting for the verdict? Yes, I'm waiting for the decision. Do you get support from other media platforms in Russia like Novaya Gazeta and others? Lots of media resources platforms wrote about my story but actually I don't need to be very famous in that case. I just want to continue my work and continue my job and do it as usual. Maria, can I ask you regarding... Your organization is covering 12 countries. I asked you before when we talked maybe this is the thing that sticks out or have you seen other things that really stick out during this pandemic situation regarding the 12 countries that you cover mainly? Sound. Yes, as Alexander was just explaining the criminalization of fake news just was swiftly introduced by the Russian authorities and as people were getting an accusation under the administrative code before once this new criminal code article number 207, I think. Point one, yes. That is specifically about writing fake news on coronavirus. Since it was introduced Alexander was the first one to be accused under it and then 15 more cases followed whereas on administrative charges about 50 journalists were accused so that's if we talk about Russia but if we look elsewhere for example countries like Belarus and Tajikistan and of course Turkmenistan initially for the first several months of the virus they just said there is no virus in our country they completely refused to acknowledge that there is such thing as global pandemics that of course doesn't exclude any country the borders are not stopping it and of course that resulted all the journalists who tried to write about the real situation and here we're talking of course about Belarus mainly because in Turkmenistan there is no independent journalism there is absolutely dictated countries so nobody writes about things that are happening there from inside there are some independent media from outside so in this country the situation got really awful because people didn't know what is going on and they didn't take any precautions so what happened is that fake information distributed by this particular country killed a lot of people because people didn't know that they have to take measures to protect themselves so yes and in terms of violent crimes against journalists that was not that active mainly in the countries that we were looking in these 12 countries the main problem with violent crimes against journalists I mean meetings that was surprisingly Ukraine and in this country the owners of small businesses were the ones who would beat up journalists for independent journalists mainly again who were covering the situation with the lack of precautionary measures the lack of masks not following epidemiological rules and these were subjected to violent beatings in Russia there were also some violent crimes against journalists but in the registered three cases and astonishingly all three cases of beating up journalists happened in Russian Orthodox churches where either the priests themselves or the church goers would beat up the journalists exactly for uncovering the real situation with lack of measures but in majority of cases the perpetrators of attacks against journalists and here we're talking about the legal or quasi-legal attacks were the governmental bodies the police the parliaments the various embassies and departments that they were the ones who would be the perpetrators of attacks in Russia there was three quarters of attacks came from the authorities in Belarus 90% of attack were coming from authorities in Kazakhstan 55% of attacks and that sort of thing so what is obvious here is the impact on the health and safety of the populations of this countries of course because fakes that were distributed by the official channels kill and in Russia again the main fakes that were distributed through official channels those that were spread by the Russian federal TV channels like the virus doesn't exist or the virus was created by Bill Gates or you know that sort of things so yeah and just as a result this control really covers two levels and then the killing of ordinary people on the ground as a result of lack of independent information the Russian population for example the official prognosis this year is that the Russian population is going to shrink by 350,000 people so roughly the population of Malmö it's 11 times more than in 2019 and this is official figure so we can understand that unofficially it's going to be even more this is the result of suppressing the independent reporting and truth thank you Maria, Mark I wanted to move further to you we talked about journalists becoming scapegoats in this situation and we really see it in the context of the situation with the Trump in his rhetoric and so on blaming journalists with the message could you give us could you lay out the words about the situation yeah sure Zandra so I just sort of want to go back a little bit on what Maria had said I mean we noticed that fake news thing happening a lot around the world not just in Russia but in many different incidents related to fake news and that brings me nicely onto Donald Trump obviously who's really sort of popularized that idea that you can decide if you're an authoritarian leader what makes fake news and by the very fact ever since he came to power he's been denouncing what his critics have been saying about him as fake news it really it's enabled an environment in which attacks on the media have become acceptable I think you know particularly in the US obviously and we've seen this with one of our other partners actually with the US Freedom Tracker who've been tracking attacks on journalists well for the last few years but specifically this year in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protest so you know they recorded hundreds of attacks on journalists during those protests and many of them were from security forces the police but also worryingly many of them are from members of the public as well and I think you know this is something that we've certainly noticed over the period of Covid is that the media has been allowed a target of people's anger against the restrictions being placed on them so you know obviously we're all annoyed by having our restriction the freedom of these restrictions on us not being able to see our families and things like this and so clearly that's you know people don't like that but I have certainly noticed and maybe this is anecdotal for me as well but I've certainly noticed as a journalist that people treat journalists in a different way now and I certainly from the start of Covid I've started noticing people being more critical of journalists on social media and about what they're reporting I mean certainly here in the UK we had very early on in this we had this meme going around on social media saying that journalists haven't got the mood for their country they don't know what they're reporting they shouldn't be reporting these negative things about Covid and that they should be producing positive news and helping with targeting the Covid virus but the reality is that journalists have a job to do they're independent as Alexander is here it's about telling the truth I mean I know that we can't be solely responsible for telling the truth but we have a really important role in democracies for the press and that's about keeping an eye on the people who are in positions of power and revealing things when they're not doing what they should be doing and as journalists I think we need to look at that how we present ourselves a lot more so Donald Trump has made it acceptable for journalists to attack their work and which has translated into physical attacks of these Black Lives Matter protests but we need to do a better job of saying actually what we do is really important as journalists we're not saying we're not trying to be negative all the time but that's naturally the way it comes over sometimes I think that we're reporting these negative things and there are a lot of negative stories around and yes we do try to cover positive news stories as journalists anyway not necessarily in my role at INDEX but journalists in the wider sense they are reporting these positive stories but there are a lot of negative stories around but we need to actually say to people out there say look we're just doing our jobs I know it's a very negative story that we're relating here to the reality on the ground you know whether that's the number of people who died from Covid or that there's been corruption which we've seen all over the world in the awarding of huge contracts like here in the UK to people who have close connections with the ruling Conservative Party for example multi-billion pound contracts that are being awarded with very little scrutiny and we've noticed what's going on and at that large scale but also the small scale and that's just in the UK and we know that that's going on around the world and that there are stories that because journalists are being attacked and fearful as Alexander has very clearly stated to us that he's fearful about this he knows the information but he's fearful to tell that but without people like Alexander there are stories around the world I mean how are we going to hold them to account I know that they have a very difficult job to do I wouldn't like to be a political leader right now trying to deal with this but we're not the enemy as journalists This comes to my brain to think about the 240 incidents that you are covering in the disease control you told me about Tanzania I wanted to leave the US and the UK a little bit and look out in Europe and the other continents and we spoke upon the authoritarian leaders Yeah so I've been writing this week about Tanzania for example which like the US has been having elections so earlier this week they had an election and you know it was fairly clear early on that John Magafuli who's the incumbent president there the opinion polls were saying that he would get re-elected he had a very very strong lead but it's interesting to see why that has happened and so early in the year in January he said he was committed unlike many leaders in Africa to free and fair elections you know the evidence since then is that actually he's not so he's closed down independent media his political rivals have been prevented from registering for the elections but then there's also the matter of his response to Covid as well so it's interesting to look at those statistics we've talked a lot here about official statistics they've stayed at something like 500 cases since June and the government might have you believe that that's because they've somehow miraculously succeeded in beating Covid unlike every other country in the world maybe apart from Turkmenistan as well but you know the reality is that John Magafuli feels that Covid has been overblown and it may be in the news and so there was a case earlier on in the year where he set up the public health authorities to do some tests and they carried out some tests on some samples and they came back with Covid but it turned out that they'd actually been provided from animals and fruit and things like this so this discredited the whole testing regime in the country and shortly afterwards they stopped producing official statistics but he then sort of turned this around and said well actually this is God helping us here it's the power of prayer that's saved us from Covid and so Tanzania has effectively returned to normal everyday life and people are congregating and the independent journalists say you know the reality is that tens of thousands of people may have had Covid and may still have Covid in the country but because no one's talking about it John Magafuli is reaping the benefit of that because people believe that he's actually helped cure it with the help from God The religious leaders around the world are using this situation as well as the dictators they make a good club together right now Alexander, can I ask you what is the main thing that you see that organizations like JFJ and index on censorship can do to help a person like you reporting from the ground Actually I didn't think about it but I feel great support right now so I guess that's already quite enough for me Picking part in seminars like this maybe as well I didn't know what to expect about this seminar but it's because of my English level I just don't know are you understanding me at all We are But it's a great thing these seminars have helped me to get through this situation and try to forget about all these perils try to continue my job my work Any of you panelists have any questions to each other Are you thinking about anything that you want to ask one of the others I think from my perspective I just want to thank Alexander for doing this he's one of many hundreds and maybe thousands of people around the world who are doing this I do consider myself lucky to have people like Alexander all the time we recognize and appreciate the strength and fortitude that you show you're doing this it must be very very difficult I cannot understand the challenges you must be facing in your day-to-day work if there is anything that we can do to help you we will obviously do that what we do is telling these stories to a wider audience so that people are not overlooked and forgotten so many of these people we talk about in these stories one of the Chinese bloggers who disappeared at the very early stages of this it's important that we remember who they are and remember their names it's this person I'm hoping that that's one thing that we can do so that people like that are not forgotten but we welcome any input from people like Alexander to say how we can help you Thank you Mark for your support there's a lot of things here in Russia that I just can't explain but I know that I got some strong support from the other journalists from lots of my colleagues they wrote letters to Russian authorities to stop my case they actually didn't react but I feel the support of the whole Russian journalism and right now I feel that I get support from all over the world that's great Alexander, when we talked before you said that working from Novgorod it's a bit different from working from, for example, Moscow yes, Moscow is now the Russia as we used to say here because everyone knows each other like members of families own companies and so on I can imagine it's like a small country as well where everybody knows each other and our family, politicians and company leaders what is the biggest difficulty with working in a smaller town with one million it sounds strange but I got quite good relationships with local officials two days before my article I actually had a Zoom conference with the governor of Nizhny Novgorod region and he looked very confused about the whole situation and he asked all the journalists and the bloggers to find some new words about this pandemic this virus to make people stay home to try to make it be more careful and think about self-safety so I wrote some of these articles and now I got the court case on me what has that person said anything has that person backed you because he's a people that wasn't officially he said that he tried to help me in this situation the investigators got worked very quickly about my case and they I don't think that the governor has any influence on this case even if he said about it to me maybe he just wanted me to believe in this we have some minutes left I wanted to ask you Mark how has it been working with the data journalists that you have been doing mapping 230 incidents I think the challenges I referred to earlier about verifying the stories sometimes that is the hardest element the technology is relatively easy we use standard Google mapping the verification process is often the hardest thing because that's reliant on traditional journalism skills like picking up the phone and talking to them a lot of things I can remember talking to people in the Philippines and the difficulty with the pandemic is you can't physically go to places to meet people in some ways it's been made easier with tools like zoom enabling us to talk to people about why we use things like telegram and signal it's really that element of it that's proven the most difficult in a lot of these countries the authorities don't want you to contact these people because they don't want that story to come out there are cases we have reported we haven't been able to put on our map it's sad that that's the case but obviously we try to put on as many as we can the other before we end as well it's worth mentioning there's another hidden thing particularly in countries like the UK and US where journalism is at risk because of the financial situation economies are really struggling at this time the media industry is really struggling a lot of local newspapers have been forced to stop printing for example so they can't gain the money people use to buy that newspaper the other source of income decimated that's advertising revenue because all of the businesses that were advertising the newspapers have stopped doing that because they can't open so we've seen many many newspapers closed down here in the UK and it's not just in the UK it's all over the world often it's those sorts of publications it's very localised and it's not just newspapers it's bloggers who rely on support from links and things like this everybody's had their income from these things massively reduced and they're the ones who reveal these stories very often the stories you see on the national news very often come from people on the ground people on their hyperlocal blog and they're not able to do that anymore because they can't get any income for it so I think we're going to have a huge deficit here and it may not ever come back either a lot of these newspapers for example have been around for hundreds of years and they've been forced to close by this and may never reopen again and some of those stories that they covered will never be reported on I think that's a very sad day for democracy It really is I got so many thoughts from you who started to talk right now so I forgot what I wanted to ask Maria you told us about when laws are getting back like we see in Hungary and Poland has been changing the laws during this pandemic situation we can't get those situations back is that a thing you see in your countries as well the sound Maria Yes, I mean introduction of all the laws that are suppressive we don't believe that they will be then turned back to normal because this is so convenient for the authorities they are not unfortunately interested and I'm talking of course about countries like Russia and Belarus and Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan countries that are not democratic and the governments are just using this situation as they would use any other crisis to further suppress the independent reporting and what it leads to of course in countries like that and we are seeing it now is that the depletion of trust between the population and the authorities leads to more and more aggression and in Belarus for example there is a big belief that this lack of trust to the government was basically the last drop that led to the current revolution that is going on when the government was telling one thing that was completely different from the real state of things and the population just had enough and decided to take it onto the streets and is still there until the illegitimate president leaves and same situation in Kyrgyzstan where people took it to the streets again there is a belief that the suppression of information about the real state of affairs in terms of the pandemics in this country contributed to this situation so yeah that's what it leads to we have a big struggle with the freedom of information and the freedom of speech and people using their voices out in the streets aren't possible right now in the normal way around the world we saw that in the BLM situation as well a big contrast situation yeah so Alexander I was just talking to you I couldn't stop by thinking about the other main big situation that happened in Ukraine the Chernobyl situation in the media cover-up that situation do you feel have you the same sentences in your stomach about the situation actually no I think that the situation here in Nizhny Novgorod and here in Russia is more ridiculous it's about it's about proven as I already said I need to prove that you're a normal human being it's kind of anti utopic as I think about it right now we just try to survive here in local journalism we don't think about the global situation and don't actually compare us to some other cases I understand what you mean it's hard to explain I know that you just want to go on working as a professional journalist in your city it's the main target I need to go on we hope that of course you will different thoughts about it I had no chance as my job I must earn some money I listened to what Mark said and I know that these kind of problems I know it very well because I got three internet sites and we got all these advertising troubles and we got all the troubles with the money for people who worked on us that's the global situation in that case I feel that we're in the same boat thank you all three of you for joining me today thank you very much thank you thank you thanks for your time and Alexander we wish you well in your court appearance as well do keep us informed on that I will tell you of course do believe that we are in the behind behind the scenes we are here thank you thank you thank you Anna Maria thank you Maria, Alexander, Mark and Sandra for this very important discussion the museum of movements will continue operating for the rest of the year and we are going to be spearheading the conversation regarding safe havens so let's stay in touch the next freedom talk will be in November with Ui Groupen so stay tuned have a good evening everyone thank you so much thank you bye thanks