On 19 January 2026, Russian independent media reported that a court in Moscow had begun proceedings against Valeria Kichigina, a journalist for the independent Russian broadcaster Dozhd (TV Rain), on charges of disseminating “fake information” under Russia’s wartime “fake news” law.
According to the indictment read in court, one charge relates to a 6 April 2022 Telegram post in which Kichigina shared a link to reporting explaining why the Bucha massacre could not be dismissed as a hoax. A second charge stems from an 8 August 2023 Instagram post on the anniversary of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, in which she wrote about Russian forces invading and occupying part of Georgia, a statement that Russian investigators labelled as “false information.” Both posts are no longer publicly accessible. The trial marks one of the first known prosecutions under this statute for a post which was not related to coverage of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In separate proceedings, Kichigina was added to Russia’s registry of “terrorists and extremists” maintained by the financial monitoring agency in August 2025, and the criminal case related to this was formally transferred to Moscow’s Tagansky court in December 2025.