Russian authorities have restricted access to news outlets, including BBC Russia, Radio Liberty and Latvian-based Medusa, RIA Novosti reported on Friday. The media has been added to a list of publications “containing calls for riots, extremism and participation in illegal mass rallies”, according to the state news agency.
The move is part of a major media crackdown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On Friday, lawmakers approved a law criminalizing the dissemination of “false” information that discredits Russia’s armed forces or calls for sanctions against the country, state media reported. Violators of the law are threatened with fines of up to 1.5 million rubles ($ 13,877).
The crackdown forced some outlets to close and allow their journalists to leave the country.
Znak.com on Friday became the latest publication to announce that it was closing, citing “the large number of restrictions that have emerged recently” in a statement on its Telegram account. On Thursday, Moscow-based Radio Echo said it had shut down its radio channel and website.
The independent Russian news agency TV Rain, also known as Dozhd, aired its latest broadcast on Thursday. She was forced to close because of the Russian government’s crackdown on local media for covering the war in Ukraine.
The station was already shut down on the air, but on a YouTube show, employees signed “no to war” before leaving the station’s set.
The network then aired Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, a hint of a 1991 coup attempt against the government of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. During the coup, the ballet was played repeatedly on television, an indication to viewers that something was wrong.
“Following the blocking of Dozhd’s website, Dozhd’s social media accounts and the threat against some employees, it is clear that the personal safety of some of us is at stake,” editor Tikhon Dzyadko said in a statement to the Telegram. Grandpa and other employees have left the country.
On Tuesday, Dzyadko told Christian Amanpour of CNN that “they do not want us to spread real information about civilian deaths, about deaths among Russian soldiers.”
Russians, eager for more information about the war, turn to foreign media. The BBC reported on Wednesday that weekly visits to its Russian-language website had tripled to 10.7 million. Traffic from Russia to the BBC’s English-language website increased by 252%. The Kremlin has also tried to control the story of the invasion on social media. Netblocks, an Internet monitoring group, said last week that restrictions on Twitter and Facebook had made both services “largely unusable” in Russia.
The supervisor also tweeted on Friday that foreign news services BBC News and Deutsche Welle had become “partially or completely inaccessible to many ISPs”.
– Jake Kuon, Akansha Sharma, Vasco Cotovio, Nathan Hodge, Brian Stelter and Biana Golodriga contributed to this report.