Give Russians real news about Ukraine using ads

Vladimir Putin is scared of the truth. That’s why he’s shut down independent media and social media.

The Russian people deserve better. Yet they struggle to get unbiased news.

But it’s very hard for Putin to shut down online advertising. So we’re going to use digital ads to show Russians independent news about Ukraine.

These ads will be shown to people in Russia, and Russian-occupied Ukraine. We’ll use modern digital advertising to show real news about what is happening in Ukraine, from high quality sources.

The Russian people can make up their own minds about what is going on in Ukraine. And when they see it, we are confident that Putin will be weakened.

We’ve built a team of digital campaign experts, who can get around Russian government restrictions. We’ve already run some test advertising today - showing people news from independent news websites. 

Our first test on Saturday got to over 2,000 people in less than two hours. Our ads have already been seen 37,000 times, and people have clicked on them to see independent news over 1,500 times.

 We could have gone much faster, we were just restrained by our funding.

That’s where you come in: £10 will allow us to show 1,000 of these ads to people in Russia*.

Who are we, you may ask? We’re concerned citizens of the world who have worked in digital advertising, marketing, corporate and NGO campaigns, who want to help to end the war in Ukraine. Everybody involved is giving their time for free.

This group is co-ordinated by Rob Blackie - who has spent the last 25 years campaigning online and offline. Most of the team will stay anonymous for now though, because they don’t fancy being cyber attacked by the gangsters who rule Russia.

Unlike the Putin regime, we’ll publish all our receipts so that you can see that every penny goes to this campaign.

We may need to stay a little vague about how we are doing this advertising - to avoid it getting shut down - but we will share what we can in updates on this page. We will try and answer questions in the comments, in so far as we can.

Please donate now, and share with your friends, to help us show more independent news stories in Russia.

* Costs per 1,000 ads are going to vary a bit but we reckon £10/1,000 is a good estimate.