Russia charges Dozhd journalist for saying 20% of Georgia is occupied by Russia
Independent Russian TV channel Dozhd (‘Rain’) has reported that one of its journalists was charged for saying that 20% of Georgia was occupied by Russia. It claims that this was the first instance of the authorities using criminal charges of spreading misinformation about the Russian army unrelated to its actions in Ukraine.
Dozhd reported that its journalist, Valeria Kichigina, was charged on Monday afternoon on Facebook.
In their post, they have said that a district court in Moscow accused Kichigina of posting a story about the August 2008 War and reposting an article about Bucha — the site of a Russian army massacre in Ukraine during the first few months of its full-scale invasion of the country.
The TV channel reported that Kichigina’s remarks about Russia’s occupation of Georgia dated back to August 2023 from a post dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the war. They reported that Kichigina was in Russia at the time of the post’s writing, and had only left it two weeks after, but was not interrogated at the border.
They claimed that the criminal case against her was launched in Ufa in November 2024, and that the authorities searched her family’s home in January 2025. She was ‘indiscriminately arrested and declared wanted’ in March of that year.
The channel believes that this was the first time the authorities pressed charges of discrediting the army against someone for criticism unrelated to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Kichigina herself says that she has ‘no doubts’ the charges were pressed against her for the ‘Baymak case’ — mass protests that took place in the Russian republic of Baskhortostan in early 2024.
‘If they discovered a story back in 2023 that stayed with me on Instagram all this time, why didn't they start a business sooner? Why only in a year and a half and exactly in Ufa? I am registered in Moscow and I have not lived in Ufa since 2015’, she was quoted by Dozhd as saying.
‘The investigator deliberately searched for at least something on me and did not find anything better than the war in Georgia’, said Kichigina.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.
