With another year nearly behind us, it’s high time we look back at the best Russian-language reporting in 2025. Many of the year’s top stories addressed Russia’s increasingly draconian justice system and Moscow’s growing confrontation with Europe and the United States. Despite rampant censorship and a narrowing space for public discourse, journalists conducted several in-depth investigations into sensitive social issues. Naturally, most independent journalism in 2025 focused on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. According to Meduza’s estimates — based on rigorous public records monitoring by Mediazona and BBC Russia — the war has killed well over 200,000 Russian soldiers.
I was genuinely trying to respond, only to end up understanding that I don’t know a single balanced media with international coverage. It is extremely polar - either it’s state-owned media attempting to make it all sunshine and rainbows, or oppositional media only covering all the most grim.
Independent media with mixed good/bad coverage, like, say, Бумага (“Paper”), changes only to doom and gloom the second you switch the language to English.
Overall, I would go with Novaya Gazeta (independent) for factual “bad” reporting, and TASS (state-owned) for factual “good” reporting. With the latter, make sure to select sections of interest because the general feed is overloaded with Ukraine right now due to all the peace talks.
“Balanced media” is kind of arbitrary anyway. Any balance is according to some kind of scale. Evidence network is the most balanced I’ve found so far and their neutral writing style is dry as hell, so there’s always a sacrifice.
Anyway, thanks for those. I’ll check them out. Likewise, if you see something interesting, feel free to post it.
First time hearing about Evidence Network - sounds cool as a concept, but I’d rather see, well, evidence. They need references badly.
Yep, gonna keep watching.
First reaction was to say they are the expert sources, so the articles are evidence. Like how journalists don’t have to cite sources when they are the source.
On further review, something’s weird about the articles. I’ve removed that site from the sidebar until I can figure out more.
Goes to show how you can read a couple articles, fact check, double check bias and background info, do a solid web search, and still miss something.
Evidence network is meant to provide analysis and evidence for journalists by connecting them with relevant experts, and they probably do that well considering the reputation and associated institutions, but the articles are all written by the same guy with a huge variation in quality, with quite a few looking like they came straight out of ChatGPT. Oh well.
When it comes to some long-term phenomena and not “X said Y on the scene today”, the primary sources should be scientific and peer-reviewed.
You claim organic farming yields more? (Yes, that’s an example of what I found there). Provide sources: research articles, review articles, academic literature.