berlin —
It was supposed to be a relaxing dinner with friends in Tbilisi, Georgia, before a move to Berlin. But things didn’t turn out as planned for Irina Babloyan.
That evening, the Russian journalist suddenly fell ill. By morning, her head hurt, her hands and feet were red and burning, and her mouth tasted like metal.
Doctors later determined poisoning was the most likely cause for the symptoms. The top suspect: Moscow.
The incident occurred in October 2022. When Babloyan spoke with VOA this February, she was still suffering the physical and emotional consequences. Her experience underscores the lengths Moscow goes to in order to silence its critics, analysts say.
For a while, Babloyan said, she stopped going to restaurants, fearing she might be targeted again. Now, she goes out just to feel normal, albeit with a degree of caution. “If I don’t do it, I will go crazy,” she said.
Letting the attack disrupt her life is exactly what the perpetrators wanted, she believes, and Babloyan refuses to give in.
“When someone wants to kill you, it’s kind of a difficult thing to understand,” she said.
Babloyan is one of a handful of Russian exiles who are believed to have been poisoned since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. More suspected poisonings took place before then.
In Berlin, Babloyan was treated at the same hospital as Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who was poisoned in 2020.
VOA traveled to the German capital just days after Navalny’s death in a Siberian prison. Memorial flowers and candles had already piled up outside the Russian Embassy.
Berlin police are of Russians in Germany.
The Kremlin dismisses claims of being involved in such attacks. Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its embassy in Berlin did not reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment.
Threats to journalists, inside and out of Russia, have increased since the invasion of Ukraine, watchdogs say, and independent media in the country quickly found themselves bound by new laws that effectively made coverage impossible.
Outlets have been branded as “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations,” and 22 journalists — including two Americans — were in jail at the end of 2023, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The choices for Russia’s independent journalists are to continue working in Russia and risk prison, or to go into exile, where safety still is not a guarantee.
When Babloyan’s symptoms began that night in October, the journalist was preparing to move to Berlin, where colleagues from her outlet, Echo of Moscow, were regrouping after Russian authorities forced them to close several months earlier.
Resettling is difficult, and transnational repression only makes it harder, said Penelope Winterhager, managing director at the JX Fund.
The threats facing exiled outlets means Winterhager and her entire team are conscious of security and wary of sharing their office address.
But from the group’s Berlin building, the sound of the city’s afternoon traffic drifted up to the windows as she described how the JX Fund helps news outlets to regroup in exile and to navigate transnational repression.
The phenomenon — in which hostile governments use legal action, threats or attacks to try to target critics outside their borders — aims to intimidate critics, Winterhager said.
“They don’t want them to report anymore. They want to frighten them. And if people break into your apartment, if poisonings are happening, if you can only walk around with a bodyguard, this does make you afraid after a while,” she said.
Journalists in exile agree.
“It’s [an] illusion that when you’re not in Russia, you’re absolutely safe,” said Katerina Abramova, who heads communications at the exiled outlet Meduza. She moved to Latvia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, then resettled in Berlin.
In one of Berlin’s many parks, Abramova spoke about how Meduza decided to spread its staff across several countries. Given the prevalence of Moscow’s transnational repression, they thought it would be safer than having everyone based in one city.
But harder still was preventing attacks on their website and coverage. Meduza has faced cyberattacks, and its website is blocked in Russia.
The latter tactic, said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, threatens the very survival of exiled Russian media. Zhyrmont, who covers Eastern Europe for the digital rights group Access Now, met with VOA in Berlin’s Treptower Park.
“The result is the media is simply dying out in exile because they cannot reach an audience within Russia,” Zhyrmont said.