Nexta

On October 4, 2015, a seventeen-year-old high school student in Minsk named Stsiapan Putsila started posting videos of local events that state television would not touch. The channel was called Nexta. Within five years it would become the single most-read source of news in Belarus, and its founder would be living in exile with a criminal case waiting for him back home.

The turning point came in August 2020, when protests erupted over the disputed presidential election. Nexta's Telegram feed turned into a live wire: crowd sizes, police movements, detention lists, raw phone footage uploaded by strangers. Subscribers jumped from around 70,000 to more than two million in a matter of weeks. When the crackdown escalated, the operation moved to Warsaw, where it now runs as a full newsroom staffed largely by Belarusians who cannot go back.

What makes the outlet unusual is how it pays for itself. There is no advertising, no paywall, no state or oligarch money. Nexta runs on donations from readers, which lets it publish things that would otherwise get a sponsor fired. The trade-off is constant legal exposure. Belarus has labeled Nexta an extremist formation, and its journalists have been tried in absentia on charges that carry years in prison.

Today the channel covers the war in Ukraine, migration routes through the region, and politics across the former Soviet space, with a reach that dwarfs most legacy broadcasters in the Russian-speaking world. Its competitors are not other independent Belarusian outlets, because almost none are left. They are the state media apparatus and the international broadcasters trying to reach the same audience. [edit]