Elena Kostyuchenko is a journalist and gay rights activist who has been exiled from Russia. She was a special correspondent for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta from 2005 until it was shut down by Russian authorities in 2022. She was the first journalist to write about the punk protest band Pussy Riot and about the Zhanaozen massacre in 2011. She covered protests against the construction of a controversial 12-lane highway through the Khimki Forest, and exposed the presence of Russian fighters in the War in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, a story which she believes led to her attempted assassination in Germany. Her first book in English, "I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country," was published in 2023.