Five Years of Important Stories

Today marks a major milestone for IStories — we turn five years old! While five years may not seem like a long time, the intensity of events over this period makes it feel more like fifty-five. What a journey it has been — certainly not an easy one.

Important Stories was “born” on April 30, 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Back then, we believed that if we could survive that crisis — both literally and figuratively — and continue to work effectively in a new online environment, nothing else could scare us.

In 2021, we realized that the challenges brought by COVID were only the beginning. That year, FSB and Investigative Committee officers raided our newsroom and the home of our then editor-in-chief and founder, Roman Anin. In August, my colleagues Irina Dolinina, Dmitry Velikovsky, Roman Anin, Roman Shleynov, Olesya Shmagun, and I, along with our media outlet, were labelled “foreign agents.” We suddenly found ourselves needing to navigate a path that would allow us to keep working in Russia without ending up behind bars. At the time, it felt as though we had entered a new era of darkness.

February 2022 irrevocably divided the lives of Ukrainians and Russians into “before” and “after.” Even as I braced for the worst, I could not have imagined the scale of horror the Russian army would unleash in Ukraine — and continues to inflict.

Just days after the full-scale invasion began, we were forced to leave Russia. It was no longer possible to do our work and call things by their real names without risking imprisonment. Anything that contradicted the official state narrative was branded “fake news,” punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

We had no plan for how to operate under these conditions. But we had a powerful desire to keep telling our readers and viewers the truth. How could we do this from exile? We feared we would not be able to maintain the same quality of reporting, that we would lose all our contacts and sources, and that finding new ones would be nearly impossible. All this, while being declared an “undesirable organization” and blocked in Russia. Our greatest fear was losing you — the people for whom IStories exists.

Yet the lessons of the pandemic — moving our work online — proved invaluable. The government’s attempts to block Telegram only made our audience more adept at using VPNs. We transformed from a weekly publication focused on deep investigations and reports into a daily media outlet, covering the most important news every day. Since 2022, we have been working at the very edge of our abilities.

In the first year of the war alone, we broke stories about the Wagner Group recruiting prisoners — followed by the Ministry of Defense doing the same. We obtained the first confession from a Russian soldier to the killing of a Ukrainian civilian. We calculated how much Russian regions spend on mobilization and how this is leading the country toward demographic disaster. These are just a few examples that come to mind.

To be honest, 2023 blurred together with 2022 for me; it was hard to believe that, a year later, we were even further from the end of the war. To avoid sinking into despair, we kept our heads down and focused on our work.

We discovered that state-owned companies were now hiring people to send to war, and that the Russian army was forming regiments from wounded conscripts. We were the first to report how many children Russian authorities deported from Ukraine and placed in orphanages without indicating their origins. We later uncovered and proved that lawmaker Sergey Mironov and his new wife had adopted a child kidnapped from Ukraine and changed his identity. It was the deportation of Ukrainian children that led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023.

2023 was also marked by tragedy at Moscow’s Vremena Goda shopping mall, where a burst hot water pipe killed four people. This was far from the only case of Russians suffering due to the country’s crumbling infrastructure, prompting us to conduct a major investigation into the problem. We also reported on how much public money is spent on propaganda and who is really behind the creation of fake news.

And now, 2024. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, we learned they absolutely could. The war grinds on, Alexey Navalny is murdered, a terrorist attack strikes Crocus City Hall, the largest-ever vote rigging in the presidential election, part of Kursk Oblast is occupied, and catastrophic flooding hits the Urals. We worked tirelessly to gather and report as much information as possible on all these events.

We located the Telegram crypto-wallet of the Islamic State – Khorasan Province, from which $2,525 was withdrawn immediately after the Crocus attack — exactly the amount, according to detainees, that they received on their bank cards. We calculated that at least 22 million votes for Putin in the presidential election were falsified — a record in Russian history.

We were first to confirm the deaths of at least five people during the Orenburg flood, while authorities insisted there were no casualties. The Emergency Ministry acknowledged fatalities only a year later; we reported them immediately and explained why such tragedies are becoming more common in Russia. We also uncovered the seemingly impossible story of more than a thousand soldiers from the 20th Motor Rifle Division going AWOL.

By 2025, we had ceased to be surprised by anything. But we continue to do our work. Despite our fears that quality journalism would be impossible in exile, we have proven — to ourselves, and I hope to you — that it is possible.

2025 is not yet over, but we have already brought you many important stories. We reported on the son of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who is making billions selling coal from occupied territories, with shipments going to Turkey and other countries and the profits funneled offshore.

We revealed that more than 15,000 people were admitted to universities in 2024 under quotas for participants in the “special military operation” and their children — twice as many as the previous year. These new beneficiaries scored, on average, half as many points as other applicants, and in medical schools, five times fewer.

We reported on Russian elites obtaining Serbian passports en masse during the war, granting them visa-free access to the EU, while foreigners arrive in Russia to join the fight. Among them, we discovered the extraordinary story of the son of CIA deputy director Michael Gloss, who died in Ukraine fighting for the Russian army.

And this is just a small part of what we have accomplished in five years. I will be honest: being a Russian journalist is becoming more difficult with each passing year. Yes, we too have moments of despair, when it feels like we are helpless grains of sand in a raging storm and want to give up. But each time, we push those thoughts aside, because we know there are people who truly need our work.

You — our readers and viewers — are what keep us going. You not only read and watch us, but support us with donations, comments, letters, and even tips that help us tell new stories (by the way, you can send tips via our Telegram bot or through the feedback form on our website main page).

Without you, there would be no Important Stories. This challenging five-year journey was made possible by you and with you. So this anniversary is yours as much as ours.

And since it is customary to make a wish on your birthday, I want to do so right here: I hope that a year from now, I will have more stories to share and more reasons to thank you, our readers and viewers. We are already hard at work on new, extraordinary, and vital stories.

But as we reach our fifth year, the reality is that we cannot continue without your support. We may be resilient, but any help you can provide is not just important — it is essential.

Tell your friends and family about IStories. Subscribe your relatives and acquaintances to our YouTube, Telegram, and X. We do not overwhelm our audience with a flood of news; we report only what truly matters.

Please consider supporting us with a donation. Even a monthly contribution of $5 may seem small, but if a thousand, two thousand, or three thousand people do the same, it will make a huge difference and ensure we can keep working.

Thank you for being with us these five years. Let’s meet here again in a year, and I will tell you what else we have achieved together!