Russia is going to war with Wikipedia. A Moscow court ruled that the truth is a lie

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Russian authorities have been fighting the last bastions of the Internet where their citizens can still find true information about the situation in the world. Now the Putin regime has targeted the Russian-language Wikipedia again because it doesn’t like its articles on war.

A Russian court has ruled that true information about the war is a lie

This time, the Russians were particularly affected by the article on “”, which is available in 13 languages, . In it we will find, among others information that Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and has since occupied about half of the Zaporizhia Oblast. Wikipedia also states that fictitious referenda were held in the occupied territories, and on their basis the Russians unilaterally annexed the oblast, and that Kremlin soldiers tortured and murdered the inhabitants of Zaporozhye. Roskomnadzor (i.e. the Russian Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications) found such a message unacceptable and sent a request to Wikipedia to remove the Russian-language article on the subject due to the “false information” contained therein. Wikipedia analyzed and rejected the request, describing it as “unclear”. The case went to the Moscow court, which found the information contained in the online encyclopedia to be false and fined the Foundation 2 million rubles (approx. PLN 103,000).

Russia fights Wikipedia. This is not the first such court decision

This is yet another installment of the fight between the Russian authorities and Wikipedia. A week ago, the same court in Moscow fined the encyclopedia 800,000. rubles for not removing information about a song by the Russian rock band Psychea, which the Kremlin considers extremist. In November 2022, Wikipedia was fined 2 million rubles in Russia for calling the war in Ukraine a war (Russian propaganda stubbornly calls a full-scale invasion a “special operation”) and refusing to remove information about Russian war crimes in Bucha and the attack on the theater in Mariupol. The Russians found “false information” on the subject in seven Wikipedia articles. Russia has been trying to block Wikipedia in the country for a long time, as it has done with many other sources of information before. Roskomnadzor has already announced that it will mark the Foundation as an “entity violating Russian law” and will take further action against it. A week ago, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry said that the encyclopedia “contains many distortions, lies and historical and substantive errors.” He also believes that Russia needs to create its equivalent of Wikipedia, which – as you can guess – would be fully controlled by the authorities in Moscow.