Journalists Mobilize, Continue to Report Stories Amid Putin's Press Freedom Crackdown

The BBC is suspending its operations in Russia and returning to using shortwave radio. The popular independent Russian news website Meduza, which had already moved to Latvia so it could tell Russian news freely, learned Friday it was being blocked by the Kremlin’s censors. Other independent and western media and social media are being blocked or are pausing their news dissemination there because of the risk of prosecution.

In the week of warfare since Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s regime has cracked down on media freedom in Russia, amped up state propaganda, closed independent news outlets, and banned journalists from using such accurate words as “war,” “occupation,” or “invasion.”

Another escalation came Friday when Putin signed a new law forbidding what Moscow considers “fake” news about Russia’s brutal invasion, occupation, and war in Ukraine, threatening to imprison anyone spreading what it deems “false information” about the war for up to 15 years. On Saturday, when the law took effect, it became illegal to call it a “war.” 

Russia claims its blitzkrieg is a “special military operation” to demilitarize and “de-Nazify” Ukraine. So far, more than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians and about 500 Russian soldiers have been killed and more than 1 million Ukrainians have fled this unjustified, unprovoked, and unconscionable war since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24. 

Observers said the crackdown on press freedom is an unprecedented war on information and a free press even by Russia’s draconian standards. It comes as the Kremlin’s security forces have arrested protesters by the thousands in scores of Russian cities, brutally beating many of them, for demonstrating against Putin’s war of choice. The aggression has drawn international condemnation from 141 member states of the United Nations, and calls from many of them for an investigation into Russia’s attacks on civilians as war crimes.

As the war dragged into its second week – with Moscow’s advance slowed by Ukrainian resistance, but still spreading death and destruction daily – the Kremlin has taken increasingly stern measures to try to control the information available in Russia about Russian attacks and restrict independent media coverage the Kremlin views as negative or harmful to the Russian military effort. 

On Friday it blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and other major western news outlets. The move came after the state media regulator said western social media companies were discriminating against Russian state media. Russian state-owned media, however, have been reporting false justification for the military invasion, which seems to be aimed at decapitating the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installing a pro-Russian regime.  

Last weekend, the Russian government’s media regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, ordered 10 media outlets to stop describing the conflict in Ukraine as a war or face possible fines or service providers restricting access to or blocking their sites. These outlets included Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper edited by Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Dmitry Muratov, and Current Time, a Russian-language digital news network led by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in cooperation with Voice of America, independent networks under the U.S. Agency for Global Media. 

"We emphasize that it is namely Russian official information sources that hold and disseminate reliable and up-to-date information," Roskomnadzor said on Feb. 24, the day Russian bombs, troops, and tanks began their assault on Ukraine

On Monday, Russia blocked access to Current Time.  On Tuesday, Russia's prosecutor general ordered the country's media watchdog to "restrict access" to Russia’s independent Dozhd TV (TV Rain) and radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), and threatened to block Russian Wikipedia because of the article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian News Agency Tass reported that Roskomnadzor blocked Ekho Moskvy and Dozhd TV “for deliberately and systematically disseminating materials containing false information about the nature of the special operation on the territory of Ukraine."

Taken together, all of these actions have raised serious concerns for press freedom and the safety of journalists in Russia.

“Russia is engaged in an unprovoked war on Ukraine,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday. “At home, the Kremlin is engaged in a full assault on media freedom and the truth, and Moscow’s efforts to mislead and suppress the truth of the brutal invasion are intensifying.”

Global media and humanitarian and human rights groups are speaking out about the dangers to press freedom. After parts of VOA and the BBC were blocked Friday in Russia, tough pushback came from leaders of both agencies, pledging they would continue reporting.

Voice of America acting director Yolanda Lopez on Friday acknowledged the ban, according to a statement on the VOA website, but declared, “VOA will continue to promote and support tools and resources that will allow our audiences to bypass any blocking efforts imposed on our sites in Russia.”

“Our journalists will continue their reporting, an example of free press in action,” Lopez added. “Our viewers and listeners in Russia deserve access to our factual news content at this critical time, not only about the ongoing war in Ukraine, but also about all vital global events that impact their lives and actions.”

Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia director, declared, “As thousands of protesters take to the streets across Russia to denounce the war, the Kremlin remains hellbent on stifling state critics as it coerces domestic media into supporting its policies. By using force to disperse anti-war rallies and censoring the press, the Russian authorities are plunging deeper and deeper into repression as public sentiment against the war grows.”

The challenge now is for U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO allies to figure out how to limit the bloodshed and violence in Ukraine and prevent it from spilling over the border into a wider world war between Russia and NATO, or worse, one in which Putin has raised the specter of nuclear weapons.

The challenge for media in Russia and outside its borders is to get the truth to the Russian people, using all the technology at their disposal to work around these bans and threats.

On the ground in Ukraine, Russian forces are going after Ukraine’s ability to broadcast the news. Russia’s military targeted Kyiv’s central TV broadcasting antenna on Tuesday, damaging the tower, leaving at least five people dead and knocking Ukraine’s main television stations offline. 

Still, while Ukrainian civilians join their army to fight on the front lines, brave reporters from Ukraine and around the world have continued to tell the story there of Putin’s attempt to restore a bygone vision of the Russian empire that died with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. They have been largely unimpeded and often encouraged by grateful Ukrainians.

Katie Livingstone, an American freelance journalist who recently earned her MSJ degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, has been writing and shooting multimedia from Poland and cities in Western Ukraine since before the war began. 

“I have been treated with the utmost respect and gratitude as a journalist here,” she said in a recent email from Lviv, between filing stories to different U.S. national news outlets. “Before the war started, the Ukrainians were hospitable. Now they are outright welcoming me as someone who is in the trenches with them. I have been asked to show documents several times, but my passport is always enough.”