First term for working for a “foreign agent” media

Who is Nika Novak, a Trans-Baikal journalist who received four years for “cooperation with a foreign organization”

The 32-year-old journalist received four years in a general regime colony. Her case was completely classified, and the trial, as usual, took place behind doors closed from the public.

Novaya Gazeta Europe tells what Nika Novak did and what her views were.

On December 25, 2023, the press service of the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow reported on the detention of “a representative of a foreign organization, Novak Nika Alexandrovna.” The court's report emphasized that the arrested woman was accused "of committing a crime under Article 275.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (cooperation on a confidential basis with a foreign state, international or foreign organization)."

The details of the criminal case against Novak (first of all, which foreign organization with which she allegedly collaborated was discussed) were not disclosed at that time.

At the time of Novak’s arrest, the authorities had been using Article 275.1 on their own citizens for a year and a half. It appeared in the Russian Criminal Code in 2022, a few months after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its purpose is to prosecute citizens, usually with anti-war views, for transferring information that does not contain state secrets to foreign organizations or foreign citizens. By such “confidential information” the security forces mean anything: even correspondence in a messenger with a relative or friend living abroad, even an interview with a Ukrainian or other foreign portal, or even cooperation with foreign agent media. The FSB easily classifies every foreigner or foreign company as a representative of foreign intelligence services.

It is unclear how involvement in foreign intelligence services can be proven. Nevertheless, thanks to the rubber-stamp nature of the new article of the Criminal Code, dozens of Russians found themselves under investigation.

In the case of journalist Nika Novak - a girl initially with pro-Russian views, who publicly supported the war in her small homeland - no investigation, no trial, much less a verdict - nothing like this, as they say, foreshadowed.

An ethnic Ukrainian who had lived in Russia since birth, she actively held anti-Ukrainian views.

But something went wrong.

Novak began her journalistic career in Krasnokamensk, Chita region. She worked as a correspondent for the housing and communal services portal Chita. From November of the same 2014 to February 2015, she lived and worked in the so-called “Lugansk People’s Republic” - she worked as a correspondent for the regional newspaper “Lutuginskaya Slava”, then for the local television company “LUTA TV”.

Then she returned to Chita, where she worked for the newspaper “Vechorka” for the few remaining months of 2015. In 2017–2018, she was a press secretary in one of the parishes in Transbaikalia.

As you can see, she didn’t stay in one place for long. In recent years before her arrest, she worked as the production editor of the city publication ChitaMedia, and then as the editor-in-chief of the Chita portal Zab.ru. Investigative journalism and politics were not within the scope of interests of these publications. But much has been written about the problems of the residents of the Trans-Baikal Territory. There was also news about crime. In 2020, Novak, as editor-in-chief of Zab.ru, appeared on central television - she became a guest of Alexander Gordon’s program “Male / Female” on Channel One. The journalist was invited there after stories about the murder of two men in a Chita communal apartment were published on her portal.

Then Novak left journalism for a while. Since 2021, she has directed the Chita Center “Gifted”, where musical and poetry evenings were held.

— I myself am a creative person and am often in a creative environment, since I am a journalist. But at some point I decided to leave journalism and take a rest. Just go to local events where interesting creative people gathered. “Once I came to a poetry evening as a special guest, performed a couple of poems, and I liked the idea so much that I decided to create something similar,” Novak herself told the Chitinskoye Obozreniye publication in the summer of 2022. “I wanted to show people from the other side. It seems to me that every person has some kind of peculiarity. And so I gathered musicians and poets who had also performed at different venues before. We played the first concert, and then it went from there.

After Novak’s arrest, the Minister of Culture of Transbaikalia accused the Gifted of “supporting pro-Western views, ideas of the LGBT movement, feminism and criticism of the SVO.”

By the way, after the arrest of its founder Nika Novak, “The Gifted” disbanded.

At the same time, in 2023, Novak worked as a freelancer for the foreign agent media outlet Sibir.Realii.

“No one knew about Nika’s work activities other than the fact that she is an experienced journalist, and now works as a freelancer,” her colleague in the “Gifted” organization told the Chita media. “Nobody was interested, she herself didn’t openly share, just in general terms, like, “I’m going on a business trip” or “I’m sitting on an article.” The only thing was that they knew that Nika was against the SVO, but this was clear not only to her close friends, but also from her posts on the page or some of the wording. Plus, in one of her interviews for Instagram “Gifted,” Nika said that she is on the “Peacemaker” list as a person posing a threat to the national security and sovereignty of Ukraine. Partly for this reason, we were shocked when she was accused of spying for some foreign country.

On February 24, 2022, when a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine began, Novak put the phrase “Russian attack” in quotes on her Facebook page.

In another post in the early days of the full-scale invasion, Novak criticized the “no war” hashtag, pointing out that those who use it are “pouring dirt on Russia.”

And this is how she talked about the Euromaidan in Kiev: “In the winter [2013–2014], there were dances on the Maidan, when the young and foolish, shouting “Moskalyak to Gilyak,” stabbed a dagger into the heart of the fraternal people. After more and more - burnt bodies in the Odessa House of Trade Unions, severed limbs near the Lugansk Regional State Administration, a mass grave of women and girls raped by the Ukrainian military near Donetsk and buried alive... All this is only a small part of what the people of Donbass have experienced... We are Ukrainians. My whole family. Both on the maternal and paternal side... Therefore, we followed the events with pain in our hearts.”

As Novaya Gazeta Europe managed to establish earlier, Novak actually has relatives living in Ukraine, in particular in the Dnieper. However, this did not stop her from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during the first months.

However, gradually her intonation and attitude changed. Already in March 2022, Novak wrote the following on Facebook: “Someday a miracle will happen (maybe), and the Trans-Baikal authorities will pay attention to Trans-Baikal, stopping doing crazy things like participating in an action with the letter Z.”

She was perplexed why supporters of the special operation use foreign social networks and use VPNs, and also asked subscribers in Russia whether they had friends who were outraged that their relatives were taking part in the special operation.

Novak made subsequent posts on Facebook private.

What exactly happened next and how Novak “harmed the security of the Russian Federation” is not officially disclosed. Whether the denunciation of colleagues played a role (some, such as the editor of the correspondent bureau in the Trans-Baikal Territory on the Tsargrad TV channel, Alexey Dmitrenko, openly hinted to her that they were reading her and suggested that she write “more bile”), or the provocation of the security forces, one can only guess. The case materials are marked “Secret”.

With a high degree of probability, it can be argued that the reason for Nika Novak’s imprisonment was her last place of work: a publication that is part of the Radio Liberty media corporation, Sibir.Realii. Neither her colleagues nor her family hide the fact that Novak works here. Taking into account the fact that publications signed by Nika Novak on the website “Siberia. Realii” cannot be found; apparently, it was published under a pseudonym, which many Russian journalists collaborating with foreign media are forced to resort to today. In an interview with Sibir.Realii, the journalist’s mother Ennafa Bozhok said that she learned from the case materials when she appealed the search of the apartment that Nika was brought in precisely because she worked with this media outlet.

According to the woman, her daughter’s problems began in the spring of 2023. One day, as he was leaving a fitness club in Chita, Nikuv was met by police officers. She was asked to go to the police station, allegedly because she resembled a suspect in fraud. At the same time, questions were asked about cooperation with Sibir.Realii. At the department, a listening application was installed on Novak’s phone, which she discovered only later. An IT specialist I know deleted the program.

“But it became obvious: this was a special detention so that the police could establish surveillance,” notes Novak’s mother. — They were following him exactly as a journalist, and not as some kind of criminal. But we could not even suspect that she would eventually be charged with Article 275, even if it was part one! Bloggers and ordinary people were heavily fined for posts about “SVO” and about dead soldiers. We believed (and are still convinced of this) that the maximum under which she could be charged would be administrative liability for “discrediting.” And this is only because the article was created in such a way that any published information about “SVO” “fits” it.

On November 29, 2023, FSB officers conducted a search in the apartment of the mother and daughter in Chita and seized all the equipment.

Novak, according to her family, still had a chance to leave, like many of her Russian colleagues who worked on projects of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty. But Novak refused to leave.

On December 24, 2023, a criminal case was opened against Nika under that very new article of the Criminal Code 275.1, accusing the journalist of “establishing and maintaining cooperative relations on a confidential basis with a representative of a foreign state, international or foreign organization in order to assist them in activities knowingly directed against security RF". During the arrest early in the morning, according to the mother, her sleepy daughter was literally taken out of bed and hit hard, so that there was blood on her teeth.

Novak was transferred to the Moscow Lefortovo pre-trial detention center, intended primarily for persons accused of crimes against state security. On December 25, the Basmanny Court arrested her. The United Press Service of the Moscow Courts then distributed photos and videos of the arrest from the Basmanny Court. The face of the arrested Novak was hidden. Only a female figure was visible in a long black down jacket, white boots, with a hood thrown over her head and a small women's backpack on her back.

The face of Nika Novak, about whom federal media journalists knew little, was only possible through photographs from her social networks—a smiling, long-haired, brown-haired woman with big brown eyes looked at them.

The journalist spent most of 2024 at Lefortovo. The Union of Journalists of Russia did not fight for her, Z-publics and former colleagues from the state-run Chita media did not write about her, petitioning, vouching, calling her persecution illegal and demanding her release. No, none of this happened. Only those who, perhaps, in her former life, before working for Siberia, stood up for Novak. Realia,” was not at all close to her. Thus, the human rights project “First Department” wrote about her and her case, her persecution was analyzed by independent media, and Memorial considered it fair to recognize her as a political prisoner (the reason is the closed nature of the case, the legal defect of Article 275.1 and the violation of the right to freedom of speech).

In October 2024, the journalist was transported back to Transbaikalia, where she had a (quite quickly) closed trial. Therefore, it is unknown what exactly Novak said in her defense and whether she admitted her guilt.

Thus, the 4-year real sentence for Nika Novak became the first case under Article 275.1 handed down specifically to a journalist. She herself believes that “ 275 is just a formal reason to “close” me.” So, in one of the letters to her mother from the pre-trial detention center, she wrote:

“First, a certain law about “fakes” and “discredit” appeared. Everything is clear, it sounds quite adequate, but then it turned out that “fake” is any information that has not been confirmed by the Ministry of Defense. And even if you provide a sea of ​​real videos and photos, the Ministry of Defense will say: “No, this is a fake,” and representatives of the ministry will be in favor, and you and your truth will, at best, receive a fine, and at worst, go to prison. It’s the same with “discrediting”. Of course, I remember the public reaction to this article. This is an open challenge to the media, the reaction followed instantly: the media began to close, journalists who did not agree with such a “bend” quit, and those who remained either did what they were told, or the information was given “at the top.” I understood that they were watching me, but I didn’t think that I would be imprisoned - I’m a journalist, rather, even a reporter, I talk about what’s really happening. I told about what was happening to friends, journalist acquaintances - both regional and federal - and guys from foreign media (if anything, they are also citizens of the Russian Federation), and then everyone said one thing: “Nika, leave.” I waved it off. Well, why should I leave my country? I was born here, I live here, I have done a lot for the good of this country. After all, I am a patriot. Leave? Excluded.

<…> It seems to me that every person who has even the smallest, even harmless thread of connection with someone or something foreign, has a great risk of being “hooked” by the authorities. It was so before, so it is now, and it will continue to be so until we begin to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors. Learn not to repeat them, and not snatch from the past what is beneficial.”

32-year-old Nika Novak has less than three years left in prison (taking into account the year spent in a pre-trial detention center, and in a pre-trial detention center, as you know, a day and a half). Soon she may even apply for parole. Unless, of course, they come up with something else for her.