About ASTRA

ASTRA is a unique Russian independent media launched immediately after the start of a full-scale war based solely on enthusiasm, without any start-up capital, investments, sponsors or grants. At first, all ASTRA journalists were volunteers who did not receive salaries, until the project got advertising and donations from readers. Despite this, in two years the team has reached a 200,000 audience in Telegram and managed to overtake in growth and citation all independent Russian-language media with budgets and sponsors that were launched after February 24, 2022.

«ASTRA started as a reaction to the pain caused by the war and censorship in Russia. Russian journalists have been banned from speaking and writing the truth about the war. And all this happened against the background of heartbreaking footage of the destruction of people in Ukraine by the Russian army. At that time I did not think about the means by which we would exist. At that moment, the most important thing seemed to be simply not to be silent, to talk about what was happening. That’s how we started working: around the clock, without any money, without any sleep,» says Anastasia Chumakova, founder and chief editor of ASTRA.

In April 2022, Astra, together with colleagues from another independent news website ‘Medusa’, have already released the first detailed investigation into the rape of Ukrainian women in the Kiev region by Russian soldiers. Then it conducted the first Russian-language investigation about the tragedy at the Drama Theater in Mariupol, found 16 illegal torture chambers and prisons in the occupied territories of Ukraine for Russian servicemen who refused to fight, and much more.

As a result, in 2 years, Astra has become not only one of the most quoted independent Russian-language media from scratch, but also the main round-the-clock source of information about what is happening in Russia and Ukraine. Thanks to an extensive network of informants, as well as fruitful work with anonymous helpers, only ASTRA regularly publishes videos and photos from the basements for Russian refuseniks (those who refuse to serve), only ASTRA reports losses of the Russian military, which the authorities are trying to hide, and only ASTRA writes constantly and in great detail about torture, kidnappings and other problems faced by residents of the territories of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops. These publications are regularly quoted by the world’s media, such as, for example, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, NOS, Le Monde, The Guardian, British intelligence and others.

The uniqueness of the project in comparison with other media is also that ASTRA always tries not only to cover problems, but also to suggest ways to solve them. For example, thanks to the resonance of ASTRA’s publications from the basement in Zavitna Bazhannya in the Donetsk region of Ukraine (occupied by Russia), all Russian servicemen who refused to fight were released. Or, for example, ASTRA found lawyers and raised funds for Ukrainian Yulia Terentyeva, who fled Russia with her sons from her war-supporting husband and mobilization. As a result, the woman was able to escape to Europe. Astra has also repeatedly helped Russian political prisoners. For example, ASTRA’s subscribers have collected 63 thousand rubles to pay fines for Sergey Veselov, an activist from Ivanovo who was speaking out against the war in Ukraine. For a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy Sasha Kuznetsov, who lost his mother in the Mariupol Drama Theater, we raised funds of 350 thousand rubles, which helped the child to move to France together with his guardians.