As the whole world knows, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a “special military operation” in Ukraine. The consequences of the events that took place after that radically changed the political and economic life not only of Russia, but of the European continent as a whole. The “special military operation” has turned the lives of millions of people upside down. The next stage that affected Russian citizens was unprecedented sanctions from Western countries. Freelance journalists, working independently, avoided many of the problems of their full-time colleagues, but got the others ones. The authors of the article have carried out an analysis of the first, still unstable consequences of the current situation for media freelancing. The authors analyzed messages in a group for freelance journalists on the VK social network, focusing on the problems that arose during the period from the end of February to the end of March 2022.