Last Friday, news of Alexey Navalny’s death began to trickle out on social media. Anton Troianovski, the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, first saw it on X, before confirming that Russian state media was saying the same on Telegram. “Navalny dead,” he wrote in the 700-person-plus Slack channel used to communicate across the Times about the Russia-Ukraine story. Troianovski’s team immediately started to write their story, with the caveat that Navalny’s family and aides couldn’t confirm or deny that the 47-year-old resistance leader had died in a penal colony inside Russia’s Arctic Circle.

The Times looked for signals where they could: Within a few minutes of the initial reports hitting the Russian wires, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that Putin had been briefed on Navalny’s death. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, gave an unscheduled speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was happening at the same time. “That showed us that obviously Navalny’s team was taking it seriously too,” Troianovski told me. “Reporting on Russia in general—this was the case before the full-scale invasion, but even more now—a lot of it is reading signals and reading between the lines.” At the same time, he added, “One of the most important things we have to do is to be open with readers on what it is that we don’t know.” On Saturday, Navalny’s spokesperson confirmed his death while demanding that authorities hand over his body to his family, who had been prevented by officials from seeing it.

Navalny’s death came as a shock but not a surprise to journalists who have covered the last decade in Russia, when Navalny rose as the country’s fiercest Putin critic and leader of the Russian opposition. He survived multiple attacks on his life along the way, most notably in 2020, when he was poisoned with Novichok—an attack that many believe was orchestrated by the Russian government. Coverage of Navalny’s death speaks to the broader challenge of getting reliable information out of Russia, where few Western news organizations currently operate full-time. Amid the crackdown on independent media in Russia, and particularly in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, several Western outlets pulled their reporting teams. Gradually, some journalists have returned for periodic reporting trips, but the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg is among the few who have remained. Most have continued their work from nearby countries like Latvia, Poland, and Germany. Troianovski was working from Berlin, where the Times temporarily relocated their Moscow bureau, when he heard the news on Friday. CNN was the first Western news outlet to report Navalny’s death, at 6:38 a.m. on Friday, but reporters did so from Munich and London.

Like the Times, other news outlets learned of Navalny’s death from the Russian state media reports quoting an official statement from the Russian prison service—something that struck the BBC’s Olga Robinson as “somewhat unusual,” she told me in an email. “Often information gets leaked first through anonymous sources and only then gets confirmed officially,” said Robinson, an associate editor at BBC Verify, a section of the organization that carries out open-source investigations, fact-checking, and verification work. “This wasn’t the case with Navalny’s death where the official statement came first, fairly quickly followed by remarks by the Kremlin spokesman.”

The Washington Post sent out a push alert with the news once they saw the confirmation from the prison authorities, but held off on publishing their obituary until they heard from Peskov. “Usually our standard of publishing obituaries is a family confirmation,” international editor Douglas Jehl told me. But in this instance, “We were convinced that the voice that actually had the authority to confirm that he died was going to be the Kremlin.” As to whether the Kremlin could be trusted when it comes to Navalny, Jehl said, “It was a call we weighed,” but The Post had reason to believe “that this was more than just the Kremlin pulling something out of thin air. It was clear at that moment that they had access to the information and it seemed implausible that they would declare someone dead only to later revert to alive.”

Some outlets have relied on local reporting in their coverage of Navalny, such as Reuters, which cited a prisoner’s account reported by the independent news outlet Novaya Gazeta, while noting they could not independently verify the account. “With the attitude toward the foreign press in Russia today—severely restricting our access to information there—the next best thing is to rely as best we can on local media outlets that in the past we’ve known to be professional and working at some standard,” said Wall Street Journal national-security reporter Brett Forrest, who covered the Russia-Ukraine war on the ground in Ukraine and spent years reporting from Russia. “There aren’t a lot of outlets left in Russia that are allowed to do good journalism. There are journalists who remain there who are dedicated and risk their lives to bring us this information, but the pressure on them is obviously as high as it’s ever been.”

Neither CNN nor the Times nor the Post had reporters on the ground in Russia when the news broke, though all three quickly dispatched correspondents to report on the fallout from Moscow, where hundreds have been detained for publicly mourning Navalny. Reporting on the circumstances of Navalny’s death, however, is a different beast. It took days for Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, to even lay eyes on her son’s body, and even then she said authorities would not release his remains unless she agreed to a “secret funeral” and were “blackmailing” her. “I hate to say it, but even if we’d had a full bureau in Russia, we wouldn’t have been any more able to find out what actually happened beyond the walls of the prison in Siberia, which speaks to the secrecy of the Russian state,” Jehl said.

“Getting information in Russia about sensitive things—well, things that are sensitive from the government’s perspective—has always been a challenge, for decades,” said Troianovski. (Kremlinology during Soviet times included journalists reading Pravda, the state-run newspaper, to gauge shifts in power.) The difficulty under Putin has been “exacerbated by the fact that we are now unfortunately forced to do most of our reporting on Russia from abroad, and that we’re doing it in an environment of intense distrust inside Russia vis-a-vis the West and Western media,” he said. Troianovski noted that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned for nearly a year, “has been portrayed on Russian TV totally outrageously as a spy,” and “this idea that it’s dangerous to talk to Western journalists is very, very, very much ingrained in many, many Russians now.”

BBC’s Robinson agrees. “Ordinary Russians I have had to approach in the past couple of years have been way more suspicious and reluctant to talk to the BBC than before—not everyone, but definitely some,” she said in an email. “This means getting independent confirmation of what is happening on the ground takes much longer than it used to and sometimes is simply not possible at all.”

Gershkovich was arrested in Russia while on a reporting trip last March. He has been charged with espionage, accusations that the Journal and the US government vehemently deny. The Journal has been covering both Navalny’s death and the ongoing imprisonment of their own reporter, which a Russian court upheld again this week. “We’ll continue to follow this story and report it out as a significant news event with widespread implications,” Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “At the same time, we’re focused intensely on Evan and continuing our efforts to bring him home as quickly as possible, as we have since March 29, 2023.” She added that Gershkovich’s imprisonment is “an outrageous situation with major implications not only for Evan but for journalists and free society everywhere,” and “a brazen violation of press freedom and a solemn reminder of the growing threat reporters around the world are facing at a time when trusted, quality journalism is needed more than ever."

Security concerns around reporting in Russia remain high: multiple news organizations cited them in declining to speak to me for this piece. “I, as foreign editor, had to endure and manage the detention of our colleague Jason Rezaian for a year and a half, so I’m acutely aware and understand just how challenging and difficult this is, and I also know that we never know where the lines are,” Jehl told me. “You can hope you know where the lines are…in this case in Russia, we take extra steps to steer as far clear of what we think the lines are that might provoke.” Reporters will keep pressing for information, despite the obstacles. “Will anybody gain access to an authentic autopsy report? I don’t know,” said Jehl, “but I do believe that persistent reporting and scrutiny has a way of uncovering the truth, even with the hardest targets, and this is an important one.”