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Elation overcame Andrei Kuznechyk when he was freed in February after three years in a Belarus prison on charges of leading an “extremist organization,” the authoritarian government’s byword for his work as a web editor at the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Pangs of sadness soon followed. He said he realized, after being blindfolded, driven to the border and handed over in a deal orchestrated by Washington, that he may never return to his homeland, Belarus, again. When he reunited with his 5-year-old son, the boy did not remember him.
And after Mr. Kuznechyk, 47, arrived in Lithuania to live in exile, the president of the U.S.-funded news media outlet took him to buy new clothes (he had lost more than 30 pounds in prison) and relayed some difficult news: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may close.
Mr. Kuznechyk had worked for more than a decade at the outlet, which began broadcasting in the early 1950s behind the Iron Curtain. The organization has long coped with challenges from authoritarian governments while reporting on human rights and corruption. Now, for the first time, the biggest threat is coming from Washington.
A month after his administration secured Mr. Kuznechyk’s release, President Trump issued an executive order demanding the dismantling of the outlet’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, through which Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty receives funding from Congress.
The news did not come entirely out of the blue for Mr. Kuznechyk. In his final days in prison in Belarus, he had seen a gloating state news broadcast reporting that Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s government-cutting czar, had called for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down.
In a post on X, Mr. Musk called the media outlet, which is now primarily online, “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves” and something that “nobody listens to.”
“Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy),” Mr. Musk wrote. “Hello??”
In prison, Mr. Kuznechyk said, he heard a similar message from the state — everyone has forgotten you, no one reads you, no one needs you. State propaganda dismissed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a fixture in Belarus dating to the Soviet era, as irrelevant and sinister.
Mr. Kuznechyk knew otherwise. In August 2020, when protests against the leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, swept through the capital, Minsk, after a presidential election widely condemned as rigged, the media outlet’s service in Belarusian recorded 24.8 million views on YouTube. It was big traffic in a nation of 9.1 million. Current Time, its 24-hour channel in Russian, Belarus’s second official language, received more than 86 million views in one week alone in that month.
Mr. Lukashenko, who has kept an iron grip on power for more than three decades, responded with an intense crackdown.
Security officials raided and sealed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s office in Minsk. Its journalists were arrested, with one snatched during a live broadcast.
The outlet was designated an extremist organization. Mr. Kuznechyk, though he worked an editing job without regular bylines or on-camera appearances, was apprehended on a bike ride. Another journalist from the outlet, Ihar Losik, is still in prison in Belarus, as is Ihar Karnei, a former contributor.
In the United States, the outlet ran into new trouble on March 14, when Mr. Trump issued the executive order.
The president tapped Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor, as a senior adviser to oversee the dismantlement of the outlet’s parent organization. In a recent interview with Newsmax, she likened her task to killing a venomous snake with a shovel.
Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that he had tried to speak with Ms. Lake, and was ready to discuss accusations of bias and irrelevance, but that his efforts to secure a meeting had failed.
“If there was a conversation about ideology or about focus or about prioritization, we take our responsibility seriously,” he said. “Let’s have a good honest conversation about the size of the organization and what we do. But we haven’t even been afforded that courtesy and respect.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in federal court against its parent organization, arguing that it would be illegal for the Trump administration to subvert Congress and withhold the rest of the $142 million appropriated for the outlet this fiscal year.
A judge ruled in its favor, but the organization has still not received this month’s tranche of funding, which was supposed to arrive on April 1. As a result, Mr. Capus reluctantly has begun to furlough staff.
Last week, the Trump administration set out onerous new requirements for the outlet to receive its money, including demands that the organization says would violate a U.S. law protecting the outlet’s editorial independence. In response, the outlet filed a new court request for emergency relief.
Because the news outlet is classified as a nonprofit, it in theory can receive private donations. Some European officials have floated the idea of stepping in to save the outlet. But Mr. Capus said those proposals were still hypothetical and may come too late.
“We desperately don’t want to have even an hour where we have to go silent,” Mr. Capus said, citing a duty to the outlet’s weekly audience of 47 million.
He has struggled to make sense of the cognitive dissonance as the Trump administration went to what he called heroic lengths to help free Mr. Kuznechyk while simultaneously eviscerating his employer.
On a recent day, Mr. Capus arrived at the organization’s headquarters in Prague to find that officials in Washington had cut the satellite feed carrying Current Time, a joint project with Voice of America. Current Time reaches its audience in Russian primarily online, receiving 2.4 billion views across social media in 2024. But the cutoff still hurt.
Mr. Kuznechyk said he could not understand why Washington would shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at a time when Belarus and its patron Russia have curtailed freedoms to a degree unseen since the Soviet era.
“Why make this gift” to authoritarians, he asked. “What will the world be like next?”
Started in the early days of the Cold War, what was known as Radio Free Europe in the Warsaw Pact countries and Radio Liberty in the Soviet Union was conceived by Washington as a “surrogate free press.” Beamed in over shortwave radio, it would show, through reporting, talk shows and cultural offerings in local languages, what the media would be like if the country were democratic and free. In Belarus, for example, listeners in the 1980s tuned in to figure out what was really happening after the nearby Chernobyl nuclear accident, which Soviet authorities initially covered up.
Today, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still focuses on places where media freedom is absent or threatened, reaching 23 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Iran and Afghanistan, in 27 languages.
The outlet often undertakes investigative journalism in places where local media are too fearful, state-dominated or underfunded to do similar work.
In Iran, it posts on women’s rights protests in Persian to 4.6 million followers on Instagram. In Central Asia, its journalism reaches millions and exposes high-level corruption. In Ukraine, its reports have revealed the perpetrators of war crimes and the secret foreign real estate holdings of top officials. And in Russia, its cultural streaming platform, Votvot, is hosting documentaries, stand-up comedy and musical performances by people targeted or exiled by Moscow.
Zakir Magomedov, the editor of the unit covering the North Caucasus region in Russia, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, leads a team out of Prague. Like many of the organization’s journalists, he cannot go back home if it disappears.
“It cost me the loss of my family,” Mr. Magomedov said.
Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist who was jailed in Russia for more than nine months before her release last year in a prisoner swap, keeps in touch with the families of imprisoned journalists from the outlet.
“What am I going to tell them next time?” she asked.
Mr. Kuznechyk refuses to believe it will cease to exist.
“It doesn’t fit into my idea of the world,” he said. “It just cannot be — at the peak of repression against journalists, at the peak of the threat to freedom of information, which we now see is a very fragile notion.”
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