Although he believed at the time that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was highly unlikely, Jonny Tickle warned his bosses in late February that if it were to occur, he would leave his position as a writer with the Russian state-run media outlet RT.

On February 24, after the Russian airstrikes commenced and Russian tanks began rolling across the Ukrainian border, that's exactly what Tickle did.

"I was as shocked as anybody," Tickle told National Review about the Russian attack. "The newsroom was shocked. Everyone was upset about it. Nobody wanted it to happen."

American and European leaders have long labeled RT – formerly Russia Today – a Russian propaganda and disinformation messenger, designed to be a conduit for Kremlin talking points while disguised as a conventional international media outlet. In the run-up to the invasion, Russian leaders used RT to push their narrative that the U.S. and the West generally were war-hungry aggressors, and that the Ukrainians were to blame for sabotaging plans for peace.

But Tickle, a 27-year-old Brit who worked at RT for two years, didn't resign from the global network to protest RT. He quit to disassociate himself from the Russian government.

In light of recent events, earlier today I resigned from RT with immediate effect

— Jonny Tickle (@jonnytickle) February 24, 2022

"Ultimately, the money for RT is coming from the government," Tickle said. "I just made a decision instantly, I don't want to take a single extra ruble from the Russian government if they're going to do this."

Tickle is not alone. Several of his colleagues also resigned from RT after the Russian invasion. "Maybe as you'd guess, it's a lot of the most level-headed, balanced, competent ones," said Tickle, who fled Russia when the invasion began.

The online British newspaper, Indy100, has identified at least ten RT employees, including Tickle, who announced their resignations on Twitter, citing "moral reasons" for their decisions, or simply "in light of recent events." One American journalist who quit working for RT tweeted that she was "done being a pawn for imperialism of any kind."

Two evil military empires are playing chess and getting off on their ballistic d*ck measuring contest. The hypocrisy is too stark. I am done being a pawn for imperialism of any kind.

— Anissa Naouai (@AnissaNow) February 28, 2022

Maria Baronova, the former managing editor of RT's Russian-language unit, resigned after condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin and the invasion, recently telling Fox News that she's aware she could be targeted and killed by the Kremlin for speaking out. She expressed fear that "we're on the brink of nuclear war right now."

In light of his resignation and the Russian war in Ukraine, Tickle spoke with National Review about his work with RT and his perspective on the outlet as a tool for Russian propaganda.

He said he never felt pressured to push the Russian government line in his writing, and he had no intention of being a disinformation agent. He said it appeared to him that RT's business model was based on pumping out click-bait and contrarian content that ran against Western narratives. He bought into the idea, sold by RT leaders, that his job would be to write objective stories about Russia that would be of interest to English-speakers and a Western audience.

"I was told it would be sort of like a vehicle to show people, look, Russia's not all that bad, because I knew that it wasn't, because I lived there, I had friends there, I'd built a life there," Tickle said. "I was well on board with the idea that we should be showing people that, no, Russia is not what you see on your TV and in your newspapers. It's a lot more complex."

Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has researched the U.S. competition with Russia and China, said it's likely that not all of RT's low-level staffers were intentionally participating in disinformation efforts; many were probably idealists trying to offer a different perspective, or who saw it as their job to keep Western governments in check. But some of their editors and producers may have been government agents, he said.

"The person at the top definitely is running their stories by headquarters back in Moscow," Sadler said. "Anyone who's not Russian or is of the mind that it's actually true journalism, they just haven't done their due diligence before they took the job."

Working at a Russian Click-Bait Factory

Raised in the Preston, a small city in northwest England, Tickle was never trained as a journalist. He studied Russian while at university in London, and was drawn to Russia – its culture, literature, and history – through learning the language, he said. While in school, Tickle studied abroad in St. Petersburg, and he wanted to go back after graduation. Four years ago, he returned to Russia to teach English, although he never really envisioned a teaching career. "It was just the easiest way to get back into Russia," he said.

While teaching English, Tickle traveled around Russia and created video blogs of places he visited. He lived in Moscow, which he described as a modern European city with beautiful, green parks and great restaurants. He said Westerners typically don't grasp the real Moscow.

"When you see it on some Hollywood movie, you see some blue filter over it," he said. "It always looks cold and gloomy. But it's a very wealthy city."

About two years into his stay in Russia, a friend who worked at RT suggested he come work there as a writer. Tickle acknowledged he had concerns about RT's reputation and credibility, which had taken a major hit after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and after pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine allegedly shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that July.

"For many, many years following that, they had trouble employing . . . sensible westerners," Tickle said. "A lot of people thought if you worked there, you'll never get another job again."

But Tickle said the RT leaders he spoke with assured him they were trying to improve the outlet's image, hire professionals, and provide balanced coverage of life in Russia.

"The problem with RT is, for so long it was focused on, like, Russia good, West bad," Tickle said. "We discussed a lot within the company how Russia should be front and center on this site. Good things, bad things happening in the country. That should be the main content. For the longest time it wasn't."

Tickle took the job, and he ended up one of about a half-dozen young staffers writing for RT's English-language website focused on the "Russia and former Soviet Union" beat. He liked the work, and he saw it as a possible first step in a journalism career. But he wasn't doing much in the way of in-depth reporting. Instead, he was pumping out four or five stories a day; anything Russia-based that would get an audience – outrageous statements by Russian politicians, viral Russia-focused web videos, Russian models, health research by Russian medical professionals.

From his perspective as a writer, the RT business model was focused less on pumping out pro-Russian propaganda, and more on just writing lots of stories and being a click-bait factory.

"It wasn't focused necessarily on politics," he said. "Whatever we felt would get the most eyeballs of American people, British people, Australian people. It's the English-speaking world, really. It was very click-driven."

The English-language outlet produced a lot of content that presented "alternative viewpoints" from those that typically appeared in mainstream Western media, he said. RT often posted conspiratorial content about Covid-19 vaccines and published the views of "rogue doctors" whose opinions ran against the prevailing narrative in the U.S. or Europe.

One frustrating aspect of working for RT, he said, was how huge the network is. RT has branches around the globe, including Spanish-language and Arabic branches, which don't communicate with one another and often adhere to different editorial lines based on what will appeal to their respective audiences.

"It's basically driven by what we think people will click on in our target countries," Tickle said.

He also grew frustrated by the lack of editorial standards on RT TV, which often didn't reflect the opposing the views that he and his fellow writers included in their copy.

Tickle said he never felt like he was forced to publish things he knew to be false, and that he was promised when he was hired that he would not be censored. But it was RT, so he knew that part of his job was to give the Russian viewpoint. If he wrote about the position of an opposition leader, for example, his editors would usually ask him to include a Kremlin voice in his story. And there were some restrictions on words and phrases the writers had to abide by to avoid running afoul of Russian law, he said, providing an example that the "annexation of Crimea" would be referred instead to something like the "reabsorption of Crimea." Tickle said he left RT before the government imposed "crazy laws now in Russia that you can't call it a war."

No Space for Free Journalism in Russia

In the run-up to the invasion, the consensus among Moscow-based reporters, whether writers working at Russian outlets like RT or correspondents for Western outlets, was that war was unlikely, Tickle said.

"I've spoken to correspondents from very, very respected outlets, both British and American. Nobody thought it was going to happen," he said. "When the buildup was happening to the war, we all thought it was posturing, it was a negotiation tactic from Putin."

RT's pre-invasion coverage reflected that. RT pushed back hard on the notion that any invasion was imminent, typically with quotes around words like "invasion" or "Russian threat." Claims by Western leaders that they expected Russia to attack Ukraine were almost always followed by a corrective stating that Russia maintains it has "zero plans to attack its neighbor."

In the days before the invasion, Tickle wrote stories about European Union leaders threatening sanctions against Russia, EU leaders praising Ukrainian restraint, and warnings from the British government that it was reconsidering RT's broadcasting license. His work was normal, but it was around this time, he said, that he started feeling that maybe he'd been wrong, that maybe there really would be an invasion.

"I actually warned my superiors a couple of days before, like, if it happens, I'm going," he said.

Tickle said he had no interest in being a Putin apologist. "I don't think there's any excuse for what's going on right now," he said.

"What I would push back against, really, is any blaming of Russian people," he said, noting polls that show majority Russian support for the invasion. "The truth is, they don't know what [the war] is. They're in favor of the war that they have been told is happening. But the TV is not showing the bombing of Kyiv, or bombing Kharkiv, these cities that people from Russia, they might have family and friends who live there."

"If the Russian people knew the truth, if they knew about all the Russian soldiers coming back in caskets, they would have a very different view on the war," Tickle added.

Seeking to counter the morale hit that Tickle describes, armored Russian columns brought mobile crematoriums with them when they invaded, according to the Telegraph.

Tickle said that in his opinion, Western bans on RT haven't helped. RT has been banned across the EU and Australia, and has been dropped by cable operators in Canada. Last week, RT America shuttered its operations after DirectTV dropped its channel and Roku pulled the RT app from its streaming platforms. Tickle said the RT bans have only given Russian leaders a reason to block Western news outlets, depriving Russian people of essential information.

"We might have shot ourselves in the foot a little bit by banning a TV channel that not that many people watch, let's be honest," Tickle said.

Sadler, with the Heritage Foundation, said RT's coverage of the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the downing of the Malaysian Airline plane showed that the outlet was primarily a Russian government mouthpiece. Its coverage of the invasion of Ukraine is the latest phase of that continued effort. The RT employees who've stayed are showing their hands.

"Anyone who's in there now, they're doing it because they really don't like the West or the United States specifically," Sadler said. "And they're doing it more for a vendetta, and they're doing it because they really do support the Russian government in one form or the other."

Tickle has since left Russia, a difficult task since European airspace was closed to Russian flights. He's now in Turkey. He said he doesn't regret working for RT, but he added "I understand this might have implications for my reputation." He hopes that being open and honest about his work with RT will help him land another journalism job. He said he's received positive feedback from other journalists who credited him for resigning at the right time.

He said he did his best to make RT a more respectable outlet.

"I feel like I wasted my time, really," he said. "Unfortunately, there's no space for free journalism in Russia now. Being a journalist has basically been made illegal. If you just have to say what the government said, it's not journalism, right."