About Detaly

Detaly

Detaly is a Russian-language online news site in Israel, published from Tel Aviv in the Tel Aviv District. Its name, the Russian word for details, signals the character its publisher gives it in public descriptions: not simply a wire of headlines, but a news and analytics website. The Nadav Foundation, founded by the site's founder and publisher Leonid Nevzlin, describes Detaly in exactly those terms, listing it alongside the Hebrew-language monthly magazine Liberal as one of the media projects Nevzlin founded and publishes in Israel. In a media landscape where Russian-speaking Israelis are served by a mixture of Israeli outlets in Russian, Russian outlets abroad and Hebrew media in translation, Detaly occupies a distinct position: an Israeli site, written in Russian, that reports on Israeli politics, society and culture from a liberal standpoint.

That combination matters in Israel. Russian is one of the country's major media languages because of the large immigration from the former Soviet Union, and Russian-speaking readers built a substantial press of their own in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. Detaly arrived into that tradition as a digital publication rather than as a printed newspaper, and its reporting is cited by other publications and by reference works when Russian-language coverage of an Israeli story is needed. Its articles have been used as sources in encyclopaedia entries on Israeli politics and have been quoted in reporting on Israel's arms exports and on Israelis detained abroad, small signs of a site that is read beyond its own homepage.

Origins and the Liberal Communications stable

Detaly is published by Liberal Communications Ltd, the company associated with Nevzlin's Israeli media ventures. The best-known of those ventures is Liberal, a Hebrew-language monthly magazine of politics, communications and culture that Nevzlin founded in 2014, with its first issue appearing in May of that year. Liberal was modelled in part on international magazines of ideas such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Economist, and it was intended to contribute to a public sphere shaped by analysis, ideas and informed debate. Detaly performs a parallel function in Russian: it gives Russian-speaking readers in Israel an analytical news publication from the same liberal editorial stable, rather than a translation of the Hebrew magazine.

The pairing is an important part of Detaly's identity. A Hebrew monthly aimed at Israel's general public and a Russian website aimed at readers whose first language is Russian address two overlapping but different audiences, and together they show a publisher building media in both of the languages of his own biography. Nevzlin was born in Moscow, built his career in Russia, and settled in Israel in 2003; his media projects in Israel began after that move and speak to both the country he left and the country he joined.

Leonid Nevzlin, founder and publisher

Leonid Borisovich Nevzlin was born in Moscow on 21 September 1959 into a family of Lithuanian Jewish origin. He graduated from the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in 1981 and earned a master's degree from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, majoring in management and marketing. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s he was a shareholder and a top manager at Bank Menatep, the Rosprom financial and industrial group and the Yukos oil company, working alongside Mikhail Khodorkovsky at what became one of Russia's largest oil companies.

Before leaving Russia for Israel in 2003, Nevzlin also held public roles in Russian Jewish and civic life. He served as president of the Russian Jewish Congress, was a senator in Russia's Federation Council, and was elected rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The destruction of Yukos by the Russian state in the early 2000s ended that career: Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, and Nevzlin, who had arrived in Israel and was granted Israeli citizenship, was later tried in Russia in absentia. A Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in 2014, in favour of Nevzlin and other Yukos shareholders, described the actions of the Russian state as a ruthless campaign to destroy Yukos and expropriate its assets. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Nevzlin renounced his Russian citizenship and became an outspoken opponent of the war, urging Jews remaining in Russia to leave and arguing that Israel should support Ukraine.

A publisher in Israeli public life

In Israel, Nevzlin established the Nadav Foundation in 2005, soon after his arrival from Russia, and built a record as a philanthropist and institution-builder as well as a businessman. He launched the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, helped re-imagine the future of the Museum of the Jewish People, where he has served as a member of the board of governors and founding chair, and has served on the board of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel and on the Board of Trustees of Keren Hayesod. He supports projects in education and health personally and through affiliated non-profit organisations.

His media involvement in Israel is part of that public presence. In 2011 he acquired a 20 percent stake in Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper in the description of his foundation, in a deal that valued the Haaretz group at 700 million shekels and included a written commitment that the editorial principles of Haaretz would be preserved. He remains described by the Nadav Foundation as a shareholder and board member of Haaretz, as well as the founder and publisher of Liberal and of Detaly. For Detaly, that ownership places a small Russian-language website inside a much larger story about media ownership, ideas and influence in Israel.

What Detaly covers

Detaly covers Israeli politics, society and culture in Russian. Its reporting follows the ordinary agenda of an Israeli news site — elections, party politics, government, security and the courts — while also paying attention to subjects of particular concern to Russian-speaking readers, including immigration, relations between Israel and the countries of the former Soviet Union, and events in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that affect families divided between those countries and Israel. When Israeli citizens were detained during the protests in Belarus in 2020, for example, Detaly was among the outlets reporting their cases, and its reporting was quoted by others following the story.

The analytics element in the site's description is visible in that mix. Russian-speaking Israelis do not only need Israeli news translated; they need Israeli developments explained in a language and context that take account of their experience, and they need Russian and post-Soviet developments explained to readers who now live under Israeli law and politics. A news and analytics site, as opposed to a pure breaking-news wire, is built for that explanatory work: daily reports accompanied by background, commentary and interpretation.

Russian-language media in Israel

Detaly belongs to a Russian-language media sector that researchers describe as a backbone of the Russian-speaking population in Israel. A study of the Russian-speaking community noted that in the 1990s and 2000s Israel had around 130 Russian-language newspapers and magazines, including five or six dailies, alongside television channels and radio stations broadcasting in Russian. The same research tradition stresses that, whatever their ownership, these were and remain Israeli media, focused on issues important to Israeli citizens and presenting them to readers who continued to speak Russian in everyday life, read Russian books and follow Russian-language media after immigration.

That sector has changed with the internet. Print titles declined, younger Russian speakers increasingly use Hebrew or English, and Israeli Russian-language sites compete with globally accessible media from Russia itself, a competition documented in studies of Russian-language media and disinformation in Israel, which also note that the sector's audience skews older and that its outlets often have a clear political orientation. Detaly's liberal standpoint, recorded in listings of Israeli media ownership, fits that pattern of openly positioned outlets: readers know the perspective from which the analysis comes.

Detaly and the war in Ukraine

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 gave Russian-language media in Israel a subject that was simultaneously foreign news and community news. Many Russian-speaking Israelis have family, friends and former homes in both Russia and Ukraine, and the war arrived in Israel again as a wave of new immigration by Jews leaving both countries. Nevzlin's own public position was unambiguous: he renounced his Russian citizenship after the invasion, condemned the Russian leadership in strong terms, criticised statements by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov about Jews and Nazism, and argued that the Jewish Agency case in Russia showed that Jews should flee Russia as soon as possible. As the publisher's own website, Detaly has operated in that environment as a Russian-language source reporting a war in Russian on readers who are not neutral bystanders.

The war also made the integrity of Russian-language information a public issue in Israel. Research into Russian disinformation operations documented campaigns that impersonated leading Israeli news sites and targeted Russian-language Israeli media with planted material. In that context, established Israeli outlets in Russian, with named publishers and editorial addresses in Israel, serve a verification function for their readers that anonymous or foreign sites cannot.

How the site is used and cited

A practical measure of a news site's place in the ecosystem is whether other writers treat it as a source. Detaly is cited in that way across languages: English-language reference entries cite its reporting on Israeli party politics, a study of Azerbaijani media quoted its figures on Israeli arms exports in 2017, and forums and news reports following the Belarus protests quoted its reporting on detained Israelis. These are modest but telling traces. They show a Tel Aviv-based Russian site feeding information into Hebrew, English and Azerbaijani discussions of Israel, rather than merely receiving news from them.

Detaly in Tel Aviv's media geography

Detaly's base in Tel Aviv places it in the city that is the centre of Israel's private media, advertising and technology industries. Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District on Israel's Mediterranean coast, is home to the country's major commercial broadcasters' news operations, its business press and many of its digital publishers. For a Russian-language site, the city is also a natural home: it and the surrounding Gush Dan area contain one of the largest concentrations of Russian-speaking residents in Israel, alongside cities such as Haifa, Ashdod and Bat Yam where Russian is heard daily in the street.

Within world media directories, Detaly is therefore best understood as a city-based digital outlet with a national and diaspora subject: a Russian-language newsroom in Tel Aviv reporting Israel to Russian speakers in Israel and abroad, and reporting the Russian-speaking world back to them.

Place in the Israeli news landscape

Israel's online news market is dominated in Hebrew by large general portals, and in English by a smaller group of internationally read sites. Between those poles sits a sectoral press — religious, Arab, sector-based and language-based — that serves defined communities with news written for them. Detaly is part of the language-based tier, alongside longer-established Russian portals, but it is distinguished within it by its analytics mission and by the profile of its publisher: a former Russian senator and Yukos shareholder who became an Israeli philanthropist, a Haaretz shareholder and the founder of a Hebrew magazine of ideas.

That combination gives Detaly a significance larger than a simple listing suggests. It is evidence that Israel's Russian-speaking public sphere is not only served by media imported from Moscow or translated from Hebrew, but produces its own Israeli journalism in Russian, owned in Israel and edited for Israeli readers. As long as Russian remains a living language of Israeli streets, schools and family life, sites of that kind remain part of how a large community follows its own country.