Global Voices is starting a series of publications about the impactful civic projects that were developed in Russia before the war. Teplitsa, a media outlet and NGO that supports Russian civil society abroad and at home, has published a book about the most impactful ones. In this introductory article, we are talking to Teplitsa's founder and director, the well-known activist Alexey Sidorenko. Global Voices (GV): Please, tell us about your project, what is Teplitsa doing now? The largest part of our team, unfortunately, had to leave Russia because of the obvious risks. We have changed our program. Soon after the beginning of the full-scale invasion I realized that, not even only from the political, ethical or moral view, war is the biggest evil that we have to deal with. From the point of view of the non-governmental sector, war is the biggest factor destroying any social impact that could be potentially achieved by any non-profit— be it human rights, ecology, animal protection, orphan children, or domestic violence. In other words, the war has such a serious all-consuming effect that, in theory, it does not make sense to support any initiatives by and large. I said, in theory, because, despite a serious pivot towards anti-war activity, we still kept some parts of our activities aimed at civil society. An anti-war pivot was significant. We thought that because our resources are relatively limited, we have to do the maximum possible, in particular, active things, in order to help the anti-war movement on the one hand and to help save the civil society which really had not stayed neutral, which had also expressed a position on this issue. Of course, inside Russia there’re still organizations that keep doing very important work event though they haven’t loudly declared as anti-war. We don’t know what happens with them and what dangers they’re exposed to. We know that there was a story with the petition of 300 civic organizations, and a lot of them had not received presidential grants afterwards and they were approached by the secret services. Some of the managers of those organizations had to leave the country afterwards. We decided not to put any accusatory labels on those who stayed silent about the war. And yet, in our programming, given our limited resources, we just decided not to provide any extra services to the organizations without values that correspond with ours. And democracy, empathy, human rights, and denouncing of the war are among them. Previously we based our active assistance on whether organizations serve one of the [UN's] Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since February 2022, just serving the SDGs is not enough, and we only help those organizations that accept our values. Of course, everybody can still read our website or our Open Source products, but participation in the events or receiving consultations requires accepting our values. After the beginning of the full scale invasion, civil society’s requests have changed greatly — namely everybody became concerned with digital and complex security, as well as some everyday life-related issues, like relocation. We tried to accommodate those requests by investing more time in digital security consultations, articles, and videos. Another important element our activity were conferences “Internet Without Borders” initiated by a Canadian non-profit eQualitie — we’ve been the organizing partner for the last 5 conferences and travelled accross half of Europe with the program that educates about cybercensorship, splinternet, VPNs, etc. Because the first thing that the Russian authoritarian government did after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, was to censor all independent media. Teplitsa itself got blocked in October 2022. We believe that very soon, Russia will start blocking YouTube and might introduce the so-called ‘whitelists.’ I think that probably from those participants that I remember, there are four examples of very effective teams that continue to live and work despite all the dangers and hurdles of working in the authoritarian country. The first one I am thinking about is OVD-Info — we know that they do a lot, they have a large network of activists, and lawyers. Their activity, of course, has changed but nevertheless, we know and feel that they are present in the field and support the activists and regular people in the field. The second example is about Grigoriy Sverdlin, a successful non-profit manager, who for a long time was the executive director at Nochlezhka, a Saint-Petersburg organization that helps homeless. He left Russia right after the war began and founded “Idite Lesom” [Go by the forest], an organization that helps everybody to flee from the country, escape mobilization, and therefore fighting against Ukrainians.