Last Friday, Tom Rowley had just got his two small children to bed when his Russian Telegram channels lit up with news of the Wagner march on Moscow.

“It looked like Prigozhin was going wildly off script,” he said. “It was confounding.”

Tom runs openDemocracy’s oDR project, which covers the post-Soviet space. He has previously lived in Moscow, Karelia in northern Russia, and the Ukraine capital of Kyiv. These days, he supports a small team of Ukrainian and Russian journalists from openDemocracy’s London office. And it’s not easy: alongside keeping his team safe so they can bring their unique reporting and analysis to the site, he has to raise the money to pay them. He had spent the week before Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow preparing to launch an urgent crowdfunder.

On Saturday, while much of the pundit class was speculating about the end of Vladimir Putin, Tom was more measured. His email to oDR’s mailing list that afternoon predicted that the most likely scenario was the rebellion being stopped, which is effectively what happened.

“Whatever happens,” Tom wrote, in his characteristically thoughtful note, “it’s a moment that feels like Russia’s war against Ukraine is coming home. Just like the Russian units fighting in Belgorod, or the explosions at Russian infrastructure sites in the rear.”

He continued: “But this time, it has even more direct political meaning. Prigozhin’s public defence of ‘military honour’ is a stand-in for the men who want a ‘real war’. The ‘March on Moscow’ is about removing the bureaucrats standing in the way of the ‘real Russia’ – the no holds barred world of violence and ‘honour’ where rules don’t apply.”

The dust is still clearing on the Prigozhin events, but one thing is clear: oDR’s work with independent Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian journalists is vital – and has given the team an independence that most don’t have. Their coverage at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion foregrounded Ukrainians’ experiences of the worst period of the war, while also giving space to some of the best analysts of the Kremlin. This has meant in-depth investigations into Russian war crimes, Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian captives.

oDR’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine war – one of the many things which makes it unique – is one of what Tom calls “critical solidarity”. He emphasises full solidarity “with Ukrainian society” as it fights back against Russian aggression, while still leaving “space for criticism of the Ukrainian state, business and billionaires”. Much of that has come from collaborating with openDemocracy’s Ukraine correspondent, Kateryna Farbar, he says.

“We work with Ukrainian journalists who understand their society way better than anybody else – and that includes our colleague, Katia,” Tom tells me. “Specifically, we work mostly with a young generation of journalists who have a very independent, autonomous position. They want Ukraine to beat Russia with every fibre of their body, but at the same time, they know that there are difficult truths that have to be told – about corruption or democracy or rule of law, or respect for human rights, or the economic situation, or indeed reforms. They believe we have to keep writing about all of these things alongside Russia’s genocidal invasion.”

This means that, as well as exclusively revealing Russian war crimes last year, oDR has broken stories about how Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s government has pushed through laws to strip Ukrainian workers of some of their basic rights, which comes as many voice concerns about a carve-up of Ukraine after it wins against Russia, with the country’s resources not used for the good of its society. It’s possible, Tom argues, to understand there is no sense of an equivalence between this and the threat of a Russian victory, but to engage with both truths.

By sidestepping the official accounts of both the Russian and Ukrainian states, the team provides a vital platform for communities too often ignored in conflict zones. It has documented war crimes against LGBTIQ+ Ukrainians, discrimination against Roma refugees fleeing Ukraine, the effects of the war on Ukrainian women’s sexual and reproductive rights and on the country’s feminist movements, as well as the devastating environmental impacts.

oDR’s approach in Ukraine long pre-dates the 2022 invasion: Tom has been developing relationships with Ukrainian activists, researchers, and journalists since the 2014 Euromaidan revolution – around the same time he joined openDemocracy.

But its approach in Russia is perhaps even more important. After all, Russia’s war against Ukraine is a product of Russian politics.

Russia, the biggest country in the world, is 17 million square kilometres. Too often, English-language coverage of its politics looks at less than one of them. “People focus too much on the Kremlin, often, potentially, in an unhelpful way, in the sense that it's a guessing game,” says Tom.

Before the 2022 invasion, oDR had long been covering social movements right across Russia. These included, Tom says, “people's movements to defend the environment, defend labour rights, the new feminist movement, the huge number of so-called urbanistic movements, which are aimed at protecting architectural or public sites. And, of course, the movement for free expression.

“All of these people were putting huge amounts of energy into this stuff,” he continues. “And they were getting some kind of results, they were at least protecting some kind of space to be able to say what they want, do what they want, and have their lives organised how they want.”

That work, he says, has been powered by his Russian colleagues, Tatyana Dvornikova and Polina Aronson.

“The question now is, how do you treat Russian society as an autonomous actor in conditions where the public sphere has been demolished? When the journalists have left the country, when there are no public protests, when the Russian anti-war movement essentially failed, right at the beginning?

“And that’s the major question for us at oDR: how do you report on society when it seems no longer to exist?”

In response, Tom says, oDR tries to focus not only on the complex positions Russian society has over the war, but to also look at how society is in flux. This could be people “helping Ukrainian refugees, facing socio-economic challenges or being sucked into the so-called patriotic ‘Z culture’ that feeds on Russia's war in this horrendous parasitic fashion, that revels in the bloodshed, bombings and disregard for human life”.

“We still think that Russian society might be an actor, and we're trying to figure out how,” says Tom.

Figuring this out has involved conducting rare interviews, including with Russian feminists organising against the war and people arrested for protesting against Putin. Sometimes, it has involved talking about things many of us don’t want to hear; the team has broken stories about Russian police torturing anti-war protesters. And in doing so, they’ve helped us all understand better – including when maybe we don’t want to. Earlier this month, oDR ran an article explaining why Russians who oppose the war aren’t taking to the streets.

Most English-language coverage of the war in Ukraine comes from one of two groups of people: analysis-lite liberals, who rightly support Ukraine but seem to ask few questions, or ‘tankies’ who blame the war entirely on NATO, as though Russia’s society, capital and state had no agency at all.

I’m proud that my colleagues at oDR have produced brilliant journalism that doesn’t fall into either of these traps.

Instead they’ve taken a position that is, as Tom says, “100% behind the Ukrainian people's right to defend themselves against Russian aggression. Ukrainians have a right to live in a country that is not being attacked by the forces of a foreign power. They have a right to determine their future, both inside the country, and in terms of its geopolitical orientation. That is the absolute baseline.”

But they go far beyond that, too. They delve deep into both Russia and Ukraine, into the conflicts between their societies, ruling classes and states, to help explore what’s really going on. So it can be challenged.

There is no outlet like it. Today, it needs your money: please give generously.