Meduza (Russian: Медуза, named after the Greek goddess Medusa) is a Russian- and English-language independent news website, headquartered in Riga, Latvia. It was founded in 2014 by a group of former employees of the then-independent Lenta.ru news website. Free mobile applications for iOS, Windows Phone and Android became the basis of the media. A semi-official motto of the portal is "Make the Kremlin sad". History In 2014, Galina Timchenko was fired from her job as chief editor at Lenta.ru by oligarch Alexander Mamut, a supporter of Vladimir Putin, after she had interviewed Right Sector. She launched the new webpage Meduza in October 2014. Several former journalists of Lenta.ru joined the new online site. Timchenko told Forbes that the decision to base Meduza in Latvia was made since "right now, establishing an independent Russian language publishing house in Latvia is possible, while in Russia it is not". Moreover, Timchenko stated: "We understood that in Russia, most likely, they would not let us work." Russian businessman and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and telecommunications magnate Boris Zimin had been considered as passive investors, but they parted ways "for strategic and operational reasons". For financial reasons, Timchenko and her partner at Amond & Smith Ltd, Sergey Nazarkin, based Meduza in Latvia. In February 2015, the website also launched an English-language version. In January 2016, founder and CEO Galina Timchenko handed over the role of chief editor to her deputy Ivan Kolpakov. In August 2017, Meduza started a partnership with the American news website BuzzFeed News. The partnership included publishing each other’s materials, sharing experiences, and carrying out and publishing joint investigations. On October 20, 2018, at the outlet's annual celebration, Meduza chief editor and co-founder Ivan Kolpakov reportedly groped an employee's wife, saying, "You're the only one at this party I can harass and get away with it." Kolpakov was temporarily suspended until Meduza publicly censured and reinstated him. The incident triggered a social media backfire. On November 9 Kolpakov announced his resignation saying that "it is the only way to stop the crisis engulfing the website and minimize the damage to its reputation". He was reinstated as chief editor on March 11, 2019. In 2019, Meduza started the English podcast The Naked Pravda, which highlights how Meduza's top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. Meduza published an editorial condemning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24