The Russian authorities on Friday restricted access to the sites of four independent media, including the local edition of the BBC, further tightening their control over information a week after the start of the invasion of Ukraine.
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According to the Russian media regulator (Roskomnadzor), access to the sites of the Russian-language editions of the BBC and German international radio and television Deutsche Welle (DW), the independent site Meduza and Radio Svoboda, the Russian branch of RFE/RL , has been “limit“. Roskomnadzor indicates that these decisions were taken at the request of the prosecution on February 24, the day on which Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine. On Friday morning, the homepages of the BBC and Deutsche Welle opened intermittently, but some articles about the war in Ukraine were inaccessible, AFP journalists in Moscow found.
Restrictions that have been increasing since the Ukrainian crisis
The Meduza and Svoboda homepages were completely inaccessible. During the night from Thursday to Friday, GlobalCheck, a monitoring service against internet censorship, had already noted problems accessing these sites, as well as the Facebook social network, which has been idling for several days in Russia. Deutsche Welle, RFE-RL and the Russian-language service of the BBC are financed respectively by Berlin, Washington and London. In Russia, their journalists regularly publish critical Kremlin investigations. Last month, Deutsche Welle was banned in Russia and its reporters forced to stop working. But his site continued to function.
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Russia is regularly described by NGOs as one of the most restrictive countries in the world when it comes to press freedom, but the situation has worsened since the beginning of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Russian authorities prohibited the media from using information other than official statements on this subject, and banned the use of words such as “war” and “invasion“. On Thursday, after the blocking of their sites by the authorities, the emblematic radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) announced its self-dissolution and the independent television channel Dojd said it was suspending its activity until further notice.
Far from stopping there, the government is preparing a toughening of its repressive arsenal: a bill, which provides for up to 15 years in prison for any publication of “fake newsconcerning the Russian army, will be examined on Friday in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament.