Russian website Meduza defies Moscow ban and treason threats

The independent Russian news portal Meduza, blocked since this Friday by the authorities of Russiahas responded to those constraints by defying Moscow from its operational “exile” in the Latvian capital Rida, where it has been based since 2015.

The website, which also publishes news and commentary in English, as well as a daily news digest in English, published an editorial on Thursday predicting its own banishment.

“We are publishing this text while there is still time for us to mark the beginning of another historical development: Russia has officially introduced state censorship. In a few days, perhaps today, there may be no independent media left in Russia,” the text advanced.

The websites of Meduza and Radio Svoboda, declared “foreign agents” in Russia, were blocked this Friday at the request of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, amid a crackdown on media critical of the Kremlin.

The Prosecutor’s Office made the decision to block these media on February 24, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called “special military operation” ordered by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, against Ukraine.

In addition to blocking Meduza from readers in Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made access to independent news about Russia even more difficult and dangerous for Meduza.

His aides can face charges of treason for reporting what Russia is doing in Ukraine, or calling the military action “a war or an invasion,” Meduza Communications Manager Katarina Abramova said.

Meduza has already lost publicity from Russia after the authorities labeled him a “foreign agent” and now he can no longer charge fees to his subscribers due to sanctions on Russian banks, he continued.

More than 50 Meduza collaborators in Riga, in various parts of Russia and even in Ukraine, “are now in a different world, in which they lived before is ruined,” Abramova said.

Some of the Riga portal staff will not be able to visit relatives and friends in Russia, not only because there are no flights, but also because of the danger of persecution and arrest by the security services.

Meduza settled in Latvia because it is a country bordering Russia, where Russian is widely spoken and because, until this war, there was fluid transit between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Now the flights are canceled by the Latvian side and the airspace is closed for Russian planes.

The Meduza editorial argues that Russia has returned to the days of Soviet censorship, before glasnost in the late 1980s. “The demand that we refer to the war in Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’; the letters asking the media to remove reports of the war; blocking the websites of Taiga.info, Doxa, The Village, TV Rain… these actions constitute censorship, plain and simple.”

The Meduza news service was created under pressure from the Kremlin on Russian oligarch Aleksander Mamut, the owner of slow.ru, a once-critical Russian portal that led to the firing of its then-editor-in-chief, Galina Timchenko, since the resignation. of most of her reporting team.

The new website quickly achieved three million hits for its Russian-language service and hundreds of thousands for its English-language news and analysis. It had enough audience to attract advertising from international companies such as McDonalds, as well as large Russian advertisers.

“The story of Meduza is the story of the fight for press freedom in Russia. Working in Latvia and addressing audiences in Russia, Meduza also set very high standards for the quality of journalism at the local level. Meduza is a very valuable source for an understanding of what is happening in Russia,” she told Efe Anda Rozukalna, professor of journalism and head of the Department of Communication at Riga Stradins University.

For Abramova, Meduza’s English-language news and analysis help dispel the image of Russia and Russians as a monolith supporting President Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.