On Wednesday, I did a Zoom call with Yana Pashaiva.

She's a journalist in Moscow, and she happens to be a former intern for Slate.

How are you? Are you doing okay?

I don't know. I'm really frustrated.

Like, every day we have a new bunch of news about companies living and life is getting like less and less comfortable and we can't withdraw dollars anymore and our currency is just turning into papers.

People are living in the country and other people are thinking

should we also leave? Yeah, so it's just anxious.

Yana found out about the invasion of Ukraine when she woke up to a bunch of early morning text

messages from friends overseas. I went immediately on social media.

My whole Facebook was full of posts of people who were frustrated, depressed.

They were crying and expressing their disappointment, helplessness.

And then I went on media platforms. And there were those horrible footages of some buildings, bombed fires, shelling.

I wanted, Yana, to give me a sense of what it's like to try to get on the internet in Russia now and get information, what you can see and what you can't.

How have you been able to keep up with what's happening?

Like, where do you, where do you check to get your news and how much

have you noticed the change in the information over the past week or so?

The change was dramatic. So right now, Facebook is blocked. Sometimes it works, but it works poorly.

Instagram also works with glitches.

Sometimes you don't receive messages that people send you. You receive them like eight hours after.

I used to get my information from independent media, and right now it is not available at all because

Russian authorities blocked it. Blocked it because Russia is tightening its grip on the internet

every day. Censorship laws are getting stricter. The pockets of digital resistance to the Kremlin are being eliminated. Western companies are leaving or their services are throttled.

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