PRAGUE — Lola Tagaeva has no problem acknowledging that she is not an easy boss. But when you’re running a startup news outlet from exile while your home country is at war, a steely demeanor can be an asset.
“I think it’s incredibly tough to work with me,” Tagaeva said with pride, when we met at a Prague cafe on a rainy October morning. Tagaeva asks her reporters “to travel to the future,” she said, and to figure out what stories haven’t been told yet.
“We have to be two steps ahead,” she said.
That outlook is what helped put the outlet she founded — Verstka — on the map in such a short period of time.
Tagaeva founded the news website from exile shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The outlet now reaches millions of people each month and has grown into a major player in the independent Russian media landscape.
Originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, Tagaeva left Russia for Prague in 2019 — not because of safety concerns over her work, but because of her daughter.
“I never wanted to move, actually, but when I gave birth to her, I understood that I wanted her to grow up in a free place,” Tagaeva said.
Tagaeva had worked at top Russian independent outlets, including Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain. But after years of hoping that her work would bring change to Russia, only to see the country become more authoritarian, she was burned out.
“Every day was news from [an] apocalypse,” Tagaeva said.
Tagaeva’s break from journalism lasted about three years. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the journalist knew that many more stories would need to be told and that the Kremlin would embark on a harsher crackdown on independent media.
“I started to feel some kind of responsibility,” she said. So, she founded Verstka.
Verstka is Russian for “layout,” like the layout of a newspaper’s front page. The outlet started in April 2022 and now reaches millions of people each month, about 70% of whom are inside Russia, according to Tagaeva.
Verstka’s success is at least partly a product of the time in which it was founded, when Russian journalists were figuring out how to reinvent themselves during war and as a media crackdown forced them into exile, according to Karol Luczka, who covers eastern Europe at the International Press Institute in Vienna.
“They [Verstka’s staff] were able to enter the mainstream of big, Russian independent media without being big and while being very new,” Luczka told VOA.
Tagaeva points to Verstka’s commitment to distribution as a main driver behind the outlet’s early success. She had key staff on board even before the outlet was officially founded, Tagaeva said.
“We didn’t have money. We didn’t have staff. But I already had a director of marketing,” Tagaeva said.
Like many Russian news outlets, the social media platform Telegram is Verstka’s primary hub.
“I don’t believe in media without good distribution, because it’s not a private blog,” Tagaeva said. “If I’m not able to distribute what you wrote, we don’t need it.”
Perhaps more important than distribution is Tagaeva’s commitment to covering underreported issues.
Instead of daily news, Verstka focuses on deeply reported features and investigations — the kinds of stories that readers can’t easily get anywhere else.
The outlet was one of the first to report on Russia abducting Ukrainian children.
Kyiv estimates that 20,000 Ukrainian children have been taken since the invasion. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova on war crimes charges related to the practice. Moscow says that it has protected vulnerable children from the war zone and that it does not recognize the ICC.
The opportunity to produce stories of that weight is what convinced journalist Anna Ryzhkova to work at Verstka.
“I have zero questions about the importance of the work we do,” Ryzhkova told VOA. The priority is stories that are “impossible not to pay attention to,” she said.
Ryzhkova reported for various outlets in Russia before leaving for Georgia shortly after the war began. She has worked at Verstka since it was founded and moved to Prague in 2023.
Ryzhkova acknowledges that Tagaeva’s standards are high. But Ryzhkova said she knows that is why Verstka has succeeded in a generally difficult media landscape.
“It’s like an illness. At first, you might not feel really comfortable with the pace of work, but then you just become a part of it,” Ryzhkova said. “What Lola demands from us is something that we actually demand from ourselves now.”
Tagaeva believes that when outlets feel too comfortable, they don’t push themselves, saying, “There is always space to develop yourself.”
In just a couple years, her outlet has expanded from three to about 50 employees — some of whom are still reporting anonymously from inside Russia.
But as the third anniversary of the invasion approaches, Tagaeva is concerned that the repressive environment in Russia will hamper the next generation of journalists.
“This, I’m afraid, will be the most dangerous issue for us,” Tagaeva said.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Moscow has imposed harsh laws and punishments on journalists who don’t follow the Kremlin’s narrative. For journalists still in the country, “you have to shut up, or you have to go to prison,” Tagaeva said.
Although Tagaeva didn’t leave her home because of her work, it’s the main reason that she can’t return anytime soon. She and Verstka have been labeled foreign agents by the Russian government.
Tagaeva expects Verstka to eventually be labeled an undesirable organization, like many other independent Russian news outlets. That designation would ban Verstka’s operations in Russia and open up Verstka staffers and sources to fines, criminal charges and jail time.
But she remains committed to reporting. And her experience running an outlet has reframed for Tagaeva what it means to have impact.
“We’re not changing the world, but we’re helping people to see the reality,” she said. “And I think it’s enough for us.”