Natalia Antelava

3 weeks ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

Victor Orbán wants to adopt a zebra. Reading about the Hungarian Prime Minister’s bizarre request to become a “symbolic ‘adoptive parent’” of a zoo zebra, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Another oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who lives in a glass castle overlooking my hometown Tbilisi, is also obsessed with zebras. To be fair, he has a whole private menagerie. “Lemurs roamed free in my yard like cats,” Ivanishvili once boasted to journalists. He’s even taken selected reporters to meet his zebras.

1 month ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

“What do we even do when the Justice Department ignores court orders?” reads one text from an American friend on my phone. “None of this feels real,” says another. As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump’s Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin’s Gulag survivors.

1 month ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

“I signed an order,” Donald Trump declared in his address to Congress this week, “making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” It wasn’t quite the victory for common sense he thought it was. President Trump, consciously or not, was following a playbook. One that we at Coda Story have tracked for years — a playbook that was written in Russia and is now being followed almost to the letter in America.

1 month ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

Three years ago this week, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an extraordinary wave of global solidarity swept across the world. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities from London to Sydney. Tech giants blocked Russian state media. Even Switzerland abandoned its neutrality to freeze Russian assets. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution calling for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory, compared to the 141 who voted in favor of it.

2 months ago | linkedin.com | Natalia Antelava

Image by Gogi Kamushadze for Coda's Generation Gulag series Dear Reader, I've been thinking a lot about treason lately. Last week, a friend of mine back home in Georgia was summoned to testify before a newly formed state commission. If he doesn't show up, he faces a year in jail. If he does show up, he risks becoming the target of a government that just announced plans to "restore" treason to the criminal code - part of a series of laws designed to criminalize dissent. New to this?