Chris Rickleton
for Freedom For Eurasia
Jenish Aidarov takes cover at the side of a road during intense clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in April 2021. Photo credit Jenish Aidarov
In April 2021, when war broke out at Kyrgyzstan’s frontier with Tajikistan, Jenish Aidarov was among the first journalists on the scene, taking cover by the side of a road as Kyrgyz and Tajik troops exchanged automatic rifle and artillery fire.
It was the first time the reporter had seen bodies wounded by bullets, as a long-simmering dispute tipped into full-blown conflict in an area where intercommunity tensions over land and water were common.
Four years later, still working as an on-the-ground correspondent in Kyrgyzstan’s Batken province for Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL), Aidarov covered the re-opening of checkpoints between the two countries, after their leaders signed an agreement to end a border dispute that went all the way back to their early years as Soviet republics.
It was a historic event, to be sure, and also the last assignment that Aidarov completed for the US-funded broadcaster with whom he had worked since 2008.
In April, he and scores of other provincial correspondents across RFE/RL’s broadcast area on simple freelance contracts saw their cooperation agreements terminated thanks to the Trump administration’s blitzkrieg campaign to defund public and pro-democracy outlets.
For Central Asia’s fragile media ecosystem, the cost of that campaign is already being counted, as authoritarian governments inside and outside the region sense a fresh opportunity to reshape information spaces on their own terms.
Bringing Distant Places Closer
I lost my own job as RFE/RL’s Central Asia-based correspondent at around the same time as Aidarov.
But I am not the only foreign journalist writing about Central Asia, either in English or any other foreign language.
Aidarov, who describes himself as a “three in one” – covering events in print, video, and radio – was probably the only independent journalist in Batken whose output traveled far beyond the province, by contrast.
Not only was his work regularly read, heard and watched in all corners of Kyrgyzstan, it was also consumed by Kyrgyz migrants in Russia, Western diplomats monitoring regional developments, and anyone for whom RFE/RL and its powerful national services represent trusted sources of information.
Batken is a distant place by most standards.
The closest major cities to the province’s administrative center, also called Batken, are Tajikistan’s Khujand and Uzbekistan’s Kokand, both at least two hours away by road, not accounting for border crossings.
The closest major Kyrgyz city, Osh, is even further away.
And yet this province lies on the southern fringes of the Fergana Valley – one of the longest-inhabited and densely-populated stretches on this side of Eurasia.
Fertile but water-stressed, ethnically diverse and religiously conservative, there are plenty of important stories in this part of the world, but almost no media to cover them.
Flickr image by user GRID-Arendal. Creative Commons
The bloody escalation of Tajik-Kyrgyz hostilities in 2021 and an even deadlier conflict between the two countries the year after turned Aidarov into a fully-fledged war correspondent.
But the region’s knotty, unstable borders were not his only staple.
Mostly he reported on events of great importance to the communities affected by them, telling stories that might be considered too “local” for international media, or too sensitive for government-backed media.
In 2016, he won a prize from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting for his reports on the story of a man from one of Batken’s rural districts who was badly beaten up by police.
Since his contract was terminated, though, stories that might previously have made it onto RFE/RL’s platforms, potentially reaching millions of people, are going unreported.
“In the past people would call us, telling us their roads were awful and that the authorities were not paying attention,” Aidarov told Freedom For Eurasia.
“We would write about it and there would be a reaction. Recently an elderly man contacted me after he had some land taken away from him by the authorities. I had to tell him that I was no longer working with RFE/RL anymore.”
At a July concert in Prague, where RFE/RL has its headquarters, veteran rocker and activist Patti Smith paid tribute to the broadcaster for getting “important information to the people in rural communities all over the world.”
The other side of that mission is getting information out of those same communities and giving their residents a voice.
And that has become far harder now that the broadcaster is locked in a legal battle with its parent entity, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), to obtain funds already greenlighted by Congress.
For now, if the problems of Batken residents can be covered at all, they must be covered from the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, over 700 kilometers away, where Radio Free Europe’s Kyrgyz Service has its main office.
But with a large part of the staff journalists there furloughed, and editorial capacity limited, the bar for a story being “too local” has become much higher.
It is a similar story for the broadcaster’s service in neighboring Kazakhstan.
There, because of the cuts, giant tracts of the world’s ninth-largest country no longer have on-the-ground correspondents willing to challenge the narrative of officials.
Because while other independent media apart from RFE/RL exist in Kazakhstan, they simply do not have the resources to maintain networks outside of the largest cities, Almaty and Astana.
Provincial news outlets that dare to criticize decision-makers are few and far between, meanwhile.
Journalists at the office of RFE_RL’s Kazakh Service in Astana. Saniya Toiken (right) received the 2017 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Photo credit Saniya Toiken
In Turkmenistan, RFE/RL’s journalists essentially work underground, facing regular government harassment for their work.
But due to the new financial constraints, only four out of a dozen or so regular contributors have been retained by the broadcaster’s Turkmen Service, limiting both the service’s output and its capacity to cross-check unverified information in one of the world’s most isolated and authoritarian countries.
Even the Ukrainian service, whose work has never been more vital, is now being forced to work with a greatly diminished freelance budget, a spokesman for RFE/RL told Freedom for Eurasia.
A Lake Of Indifference
It’s probably fair to say that the prospects for information vacuums in Batken province and Turkmenistan aren’t keeping Kari Lake awake at night.
An unflinching America Firster and Trump supporter best known for losing out in senate and gubernatorial races in Arizona, Lake was in March sworn in as Special Advisor to USAGM, which oversees Voice of America (VOA) and USAGM grantees such as RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia (RFA).
At a June 25 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing where she gave testimony on USAGM and its future, Lake mocked Democrat Congressman Jim Costa for having “a soft spot in your heart for Armenia” when Costa bemoaned the layoffs at VOA’s small Armenian service.
Costa had argued that the cuts would make Armenians vulnerable to Russian disinformation at a time when the country’s government was making moves to distance itself from the Kremlin.
Kari Lake speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Dillon Precision in Scottsdale, Arizona, October 19, 2022. Photo by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons
Time and again during the hearing, Lake failed to provide direct answers to questions about how Washington’s adversaries, China and Russia, might benefit from the gutting of publicly-funded American broadcasters actively countering their messaging.
Instead, she argued — while failing to provide any proof of having conducted a thorough review of any of USAGM’s related entities — that VOA had already been infiltrated by both countries’ agents.
“Unfortunately, the only people that seem to have any influence [over VOA coverage] are our adversaries…It’s outrageous and it has to stop,” she told the hearing, where she described USAGM as bloated, corrupt, and a national security threat.
Despite the funding crunch that began in the spring, RFE/RL still has the largest presence of any independent media outlet operating across Central Asia by some distance.
That it has survived in such a solidly authoritarian region for so long is partly explained by its association with the US Congress, which appropriates its funding from one fiscal year to the next.
This powerful umbrella hasn’t stopped the broadcaster being declared either “extremist” or “undesirable” in other former Soviet countries like Belarus and Russia.
And all of the broadcaster’s three bureaus in the region – in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (the Uzbekistan bureau was closed 2005) – have been under sustained government pressure in recent years.
But Washington’s moral and financial support for RFE/RL has at least been a consideration for Central Asian governments that strive to retain cooperative ties with the West.
Now that this backing has disappeared, they have no reason to treat it differently from any other critic – a fact that is not lost on them.
Earlier this summer, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry reprised a standoff over accreditation of journalists working for RFE/RL’s Kazakh service, despite the broadcaster having seemingly settled all its differences over accreditation with the Ministry last year.
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in March said that the Trump administration’s self-described effort to root out waste in foreign spending “deserves support.”
Tokayev used the same speech to take aim at unspecified US-funded non-governmental organizations that he said promoted “so-called democratic and moral values – including LGBT.”
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov (right) signed on August 7, 2025 a new media law that experts have described as increasing government control over media outlets. Kremlin handout, unrestricted use
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, who has used his bully pulpit to assail RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz service multiple times in the past, was more direct.
The populist waited less than 24 hours to hail the words of Elon Musk, then leading the DOGE waste-cutting effort, after the billionaire accused publicly-funded media of “torching $1 billion a year of U.S. taxpayer money” and called to “shut them all down,” in a February post on X.
In an impromptu interview with Kyrgyzstan’s state information agency Kabar, Japarov credited Musk for his stance, while adding that Kyrgyz people “don’t need” Radio Azattyk, as RFE/RL is known in Kyrgyzstan, in the age of smartphones.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t need my guidance… They are both billionaires. They know very well that money does not fall from the sky. They say that it is time to stop wasting American money. And they are absolutely right.”
Not A Relic, Barely A Radio
Kabar is a direct descendent of KyrTAG, a state news agency set up in 1937, when Kyrgyzstan was a Soviet republic.
It perfectly fits the definition of a government mouthpiece and has been Japarov’s preferred form of communication with the Kyrgyz people since he all but did away with presidential press-conferences after coming to power in 2020.
It was in order to rival the monopoly of such agencies – spouting propaganda behind the “Iron Curtain” – that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were set up, initially as separate, CIA-backed operations, after the end of World War Two.
Photo of the Radio Free Europe_Radio Liberty building in Prague. Photo by Skot. Creative Commons.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Voice of America (VOA) are no longer solely radio broadcasters, of course.
They are now comprehensive multimedia platforms with websites and major presences across all well-known social media platforms, YouTube channels and internet television, enabling them to reach wider audiences in a diversity of formats.
But Lake was happy to let the idea that USAGM-related outlets were outdated fester during her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“To think that we’re putting out some radio show in the land of computers and internet, to me, is very antiquated,” said Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, who said the people of Tennessee were “fed up of paying for this garbage.”
“It’s a relic,” agreed Lake.
“A cold war relic,” added Burchett.
Committee Chair Brian Mast, another Republican, returned to the relic theme as he wrapped up the session, holding aloft his smartphone and declaring the death of journalism as people once knew it.
“We can accomplish today, with any one given phone, what it used to take a team of people to do…That’s the difference in the world today as to just a decade ago,” Mast said.
“That’s right,” chimed Lake, who had earlier invoked conservative podcast host Joe Rogan as an example of a “one man show” that “reaches hundreds of millions of people.”
In Central Asia and other parts of RFE/RL’s broadcast region, experiments with new multimedia formats have been undertaken not just to cater to changing tastes, but to circumvent government blocks and throttling of the broadcaster’s websites.
But there was an even deeper irony to the sometimes surreal exchanges at the Kari Lake/USAGM hearing than that.
Created to counter disinformation propaganda abroad with real journalism, RFE/RL and other US-funded media have now become the targets of disinformation inside a legislature where they once enjoyed solid bipartisan support.
End Games
On July 18, a court in the U.S. District of Columbia ordered USAGM to immediately release the rest of RFE/RL’s funding for fiscal year 2025, in the latest of a series of court rulings deeming the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold the funds illegal.
Given where power lies in U.S. politics at present, RFE/RL’s long-term future as an American organization would appear bleak.
In late May, the European Union stepped in with €5.5 million in short-term funding, to help keep RFE/RL operational.
The Czech Republic has been at the heart of efforts to set up longer-term funding involving multiple European countries.
But if Europe is potentially RFE/RL’s future, what will that future look like in a region like Central Asia?
Will the broadcaster still be a real force for national languages like Kyrgyz and Kazakh that are still developing after decades of underdevelopment and Russian-language domination during the Soviet Union?
Will its small but dedicated Uzbek service still be able to conduct investigations into the activities of Uzbekistan’s ruling family, a topic that other Uzbek media simply cannot touch?
Will it still be able to invest in places like Kyrgyzstan’s Batken, and reporters like Jenish Aidarov, and help the world know more about what is happening in closed-off Turkmenistan?
Correspondents of RFE_RL’s Tajik Service prepare a news programme in a studio at RFE_RL’s headquarters in Prague. Photo by Chris Rickleton
In this complicated, landlocked region, the future of RFE/RL is very closely tied to the future of independent journalism as a whole.
The broadcaster partners with peers for investigations, provides deep coverage of freedom of speech issues, and has trained up multiple journalists who now lead smaller independent media outlets.
If it retreats, others will advance.
Russian state television – in the Russian language — is already a staple in the region
And after years of Moscow sleeping on Central Asia’s national languages – Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek – the Russian government-funded media outlet Sputnik launched websites in all of those languages except Turkmen a decade ago.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the propaganda outlet Russia Today (RT) called Trump’s order to cut down USAGM to its statutory minimum “an awesome decision.”
And China is reportedly ramping up its information efforts globally amid the USAGM standoffs.
But in some ways, the concern of whether it is local or foreign government-backed media profiting from RFE/RL’s potential demise in Central Asia is secondary.
More important than that is what has already been lost, what else might still be lost, and whether the will to restore it can be found again.
