Katerina Gordeeva (born in 1977) is one of Russia’s most famous independent journalists. Until 2012, she worked as a TV reporter for the federal television channel NTV. During her time at NTV, she reported as from the frontlines of Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq as a war correspondent. She later resigned from the channel due to a disagreement with the channel’s programming agenda.

Katerina left Moscow out of protest in 2014, after Russia’s remorseless annexation of Crimea and seizure of part of Eastern Ukraine. In 2020, she created her own YouTube channel, which today has more than 1.65 million subscribers.

To make her documentary film Humans At War, Katerina Gordeeva travelled to dozens of refugee shelters in both Europe and Russia. She collected first-person accounts by interviewing of people with opposing views about their experiences and how the war had drastically changed their lives. This three-hour testimonial film has been viewed by more than 3 million people.

In the summer of 2022, Gordeeva was named as one of the top 10 most influential independent journalists in Russia. She is a five-time winner of the Redcollegia Award, an independent prize that recognizes the work of journalists doing ground-breaking work despite government pressure. Gordeeva was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya International Journalism Prize in August in 2022, an award that truly honors her commitment to independent journalism. In September 2022, the Russian government named Gordeeva a “foreign agent,” a title that is often compared to the term “enemy of people,” which was used in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.

Katerina’s daily work continues to demonstrate her tremendous devotion to unbiased journalism during these very challenging times.