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In October of 2022, Olesia Krivtsova, a nineteen-year-old student in Russia, posted a series of messages on social media that would change her life. Several months earlier, Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine, and Krivtsova, like millions of Russians, was enraged. On Instagram and VKontakte, a Russian app, she blasted her government and voiced support for anti-war protesters. Within months, a regional court judge in Arkhangelsk, a northwestern port city, charged her with supporting terrorism and “discrediting” the Russian army, and placed her under house arrest. Fearing for her freedom, in March of 2023 she fled Russia and resettled in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Soon after, Thomas Nilsen, the editor of the Barents Observer , a nonprofit regional news outlet that had chronicled her dramatic escape, published an op-ed inviting Krivtsova to join his newsroom in Kirkenes, an Arctic town in Norway nine miles from the Russian border.…