It looked like a scene from an action movie. A phalanx of masked men in military fatigues march up to the offices of a media outlet in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea. They are led by a young man wearing a long, black coat, his face uncovered. When the journalists inside refuse to open the door, the men in balaclavas smash a window and force their way in.

But this was no movie.

It was March 2014 and Russia had annexed the entire peninsula. Now a pro-Russian militia was taking over the region’s leading independent news source, the Crimean Center For Investigative Reporting.

The man in the black coat announced that from now on this would be the headquarters of the “Crimean Front” militia, because, he said, from “this building does not come true information.” But, he added, staff could return to work if they agreed to report on events in the “correct, truthful” way.