Last Friday, Tom Rowley had just got his two small children to bed when his Russian Telegram channels lit up with news of the Wagner march on Moscow.
“It looked like Prigozhin was going wildly off script,” he said. “It was confounding.”
Tom runs openDemocracy’s oDR project, which covers the post-Soviet space. He has previously lived in Moscow, Karelia in northern Russia, and the Ukraine capital of Kyiv. These days, he supports a small team of Ukrainian and Russian journalists from openDemocracy’s London office. And it’s not easy: alongside keeping his team safe so they can bring their unique reporting and analysis to the site, he has to raise the money to pay them. He had spent the week before Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow preparing to launch an urgent crowdfunder.
