On August 2, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov took part in a panel discussion called “Elements of Social Engineering” at a youth forum in Solnechnogorsk, a town in the Moscow region.
Peskov said Western media outlets have been “receiving instructions and manuals” from their intelligence services, which he said mostly contain “professionally prepared falsehoods.”
“There are a lot of serious media outlets [in the West], a lot of talented journalists, smart, professional, but now, since they unleashed this war against us, they absolutely live in a state of military censorship,”
Peskov’s statement is an example of an accusation in a mirror — accusing the West of doing what Russia is doing.
Moscow has weaponized the Russian news media in its hybrid war against Ukraine, including to portray its war of aggression as a Western plot against Russia.
An audience in New Delhi, India, laughed at Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for repeating that false claim in March.
Russia enacted strict censorship measures last year criminalizing accurate war reporting. Yet, Peskov now claims it is “Western media” that is living under a state of “military censorship.”
Like other authoritarian regimes, Russia’s government regularly treats “Western media” as if they uniformly represent the interests of their governments.
But unlike the Russian state media apparatus, Western media outlets have a variety of funding and ownership structures, not to mention editorial lines.
The Russian government launched a war against the independent media in 2000, soon after Vladimir Putin became president and partly in response of a brutal war in Chechnya.
The Kremlin has long controlled the three major TV channels, where still get their news.
Under Putin’s decades long rule, the Kremlin systematically other independent media outlets. That process ramped up after Russia’s clandestine invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
In December 2013 — roughly two weeks after the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine began — Putin dismantled the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, which attempted editorial balance and critical coverage of Russian domestic affairs.
state news agency — MIA Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) — owns and operates the broadcaster Sputnik and the RIA Novosti news agency. Rossiya Segodnya’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, is also editor-in-chief of RT (formerly Russia Today).
The database of the Russian federal agency for government property management lists MIA Rossiya Segodnya as
MIA Rossiya Segodnya fully represents the Kremlin’s interests in its editorial line and has been central to Russia’s nearly decade-long propaganda war against Ukraine.
In March 214, the chief editor of the liberal news website Lenta.ru with a pro-Kremlin figure after running an interview with Dmytro Yarosh, leader of Ukraine's Right Sector movement. Journalists from Lenta.ru later set up the news outlet Meduza, which operates out of Latvia to avoid Russia’s censorship regime.
Independent media outlets have long faced state-sanctioned harassment. Some were forced to which Daniel Salarua, a contributor to the International Press Institute, a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, s a “key tool for repressing independent media.”
Russian journalists have regularly been targeted for attacks. Dozens .
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine saw a significant ramping up of Russia’s censorship regime.
Russia adopted a law making it illegal to call the war in Ukraine a war. Reporting what the Kremlin deems to be false information about its war in Ukraine or the Russian armed forces can be punished by up to 15 years imprisonment.
Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor media outlets to use only “information and data” from “official Russian sources.”
The media law led several Russia media outlets to stop covering the war in Ukraine. The liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) for not censoring its war coverage. And the Nobel Prize winning independent newspaper was forced into emigration in Europe.
The beleaguered Russian TV channel Dozhd in Russia and eventually relocated to the Netherlands. (Russian cable providers had already dropped Dozhd in 2014.)
In July, Russian authorities designated Dozhd as an “undesirable” organization.
Under Russian law, membership in an undesirable organization is .