There’s a certain kind of American podcast where two young journalists investigate their own medium-size problems, laugh a lot, interview their moms.

Sonya Groysman, a 27-year-old journalist in Moscow working for the independent news site Proekt, was a fan of those shows, and so when she and her colleague Olga Churakova ran into trouble, it seemed natural to start recording. But the problems they’ve discussed in that familiar format are terrifying and existential. Last month the two women were placed on the Russian government’s list of “foreign agents,” a designation that threatens to end their careers and, if they fail to fill out reams of paperwork and attach a 24-word disclaimer even to personal social-media posts, could mean heavy fines and jail time.

So their podcast is called “Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent.” The first episode begins with Groysman stumbling, laughing, through the disclaimer, which translates as: “THIS NEWS MEDIA/MATERIAL WAS CREATED AND/OR DISSEMINATED BY A FOREIGN MASS MEDIA PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT AND/OR A RUSSIAN LEGAL ENTITY PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT.” In another episode, Churakova tries and fails to get a job at a fast-food chain specialising in blini after explaining her new status.

Groysman and her co-host aren’t asking listeners for money to support the podcast, she said, because she’s worried that her use of something like the American crowdfunding platform Patreon could be misconstrued and held against her. The podcast, she said, is simply their way of staying “on assignment.”

In February I wrote in this space about the unlikely flowering in Russian online journalism over the past year. In a country where, essentially, every major television broadcaster is a highly produced, pro-government analogue of Fox News, a number of digital outlets have delivered riveting scoops. They exposed the family wealth of President Vladimir Putin and reported on the agents who poisoned the opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

It was all part of a global wave of unflinching journalism in unfriendly places — the Afghan press was, until last week, the freest in its region — where autocrats have increasingly viewed reporters as a threat. This summer, the Russian government has tried to stop the wave by designating its highest-impact critics as “undesirable,” or as foreign agents, or both.