Ekaterina Glikman: ‘It pains me deeply to see what’s happening in Ukraine and Russia’ 

Elena Servettaz (l) and Ekaterina Glikman (r) SWI swissinfo.ch

Ekaterina Glikman, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe, is the latest guest on On the RecordExternal link. In this episode, she talks about the challenges of working as a journalist in exile in Switzerland, and how the new media outlet covers events in Ukraine and Russia. 

After the war in Ukraine began, several journalists from Novaya Gazeta stayed in Russia, continuing their work under censorship and, remarkably, still managing to accomplish a great deal despite the restrictions. Others left the country and started the media outlet in exile, Novaya Gazeta Europe.  

Novaya Gazeta Europe as a media outlet in exile

“We couldn’t abandon a name that was in our blood,” explains Ekaterina Glikman, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe. They now work without censorship – but also without a homeland. 

“To this day, we don’t know if we will ever be able to return,” she says. 

Glikman lives in Schaffhausen in northern Switzerland with her Swiss husband, while most of her colleagues are based in Latvia. She has an unusual passion – studying weevils. She travels to the jungles of Thailand to catch the small beetles using a special net with a telescopic handle. She has even named three newly discovered species after her former Novaya Gazeta colleagues – Muradov, Rost, and Surukhanov. 

Documenting war crimes to preserve historical truth

Novaya Gazeta Europe has correspondents in Ukrainian regions occupied by Russian forces, and in Kyiv and Russia. “Our goal is to document everything so that crimes are not erased and so they don’t just disappear as if they never happened,” says Glikman. 

How do journalists who were forced to leave their countries survive financially, and how do they differ from journalists who moved abroad for economic or other reasons? How do reporters interview former Ukrainian prisoners of war about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of Russian forces? And how did Schaffhausen bid farewell to Alexei Navalny? 

Edited by Benjamin von Wyl/sb