Ranking: Unfree. Russia is ranked 150 out of 180 countries in Reporters without Borders’ 2021 world press freedom index. “With draconian laws, website-blocking, Internet cuts and leading news outlets reined in or throttled out of existence, the pressure on independent media has grown steadily since the big anti-government protests in 2011 and 2012. The harassment has risen to a new level since Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny’s return to Russia and immediate arrest on arrival. Journalists trying to cover Navalny-related events including demonstrations in his support are being subjected to unprecedented and sometimes violent obstruction. As the major TV channels continue to inundate viewers with propaganda, the climate has become very oppressive for those who question the new patriotic and neo-conservative discourse, or just try to maintain quality journalism. Vague and selectively laws are used to imprison journalists and bloggers. The Kremlin seems determined to control the Internet, a goal referred to as the ‘sovereign Internet.’ Journalists are now being branded as ‘foreign agents,’ a defamatory label already applied to some media outlets and leading media defence NGOs. Journalists covering the big protests taking place in the far-east city of Khabarovsk since the summer of 2020 are often arrested and given huge arbitrary fines to make them stop. Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, and Chechnya have meanwhile become ‘black holes’ from which little news and information emerges. Two other republics in the Russian Caucasus, Dagestan and Ingushetia, are going the same way. Murders and physical attacks against journalists continue to go unpunished–even if campaigns can achieve victories in the face of absurd accusations by the authorities, as in the case of Ivan Golunov, an investigative journalist released in June 2019 after being arrested on a trumped-up drug trafficking charge.”

UPDATE: Following Russia’ invasion of Ukraine in February 2021, the State Duma passed a law making it a major crime to publish what the Kremlin deems “fake” news about the country’s military. Violators face fifteen years in prison. This includes references to the invasion that call it an invasion, as opposed to a “special military operation.” The law is part of a sweeping crackdown on freedom of expression in Russia, and has obliterated any remaining vestiges of a free or critical press. Journalists who might once have been prepared to report the truth under the threat of censorship or mild penalties will be far less prepared to spend most of their lives incarcerated. Media houses known for their independence from the Kremlin were shut down days after the invasion began. Western news organizations such as the BBC, the New York Times, and Bloomberg News have suspended or scaled back their operations in Russia. Social media sites such as Facebook have been banned. Russia’s press freedom climate is now one of the world’s most unfree. For this reason, nothing you read in the Russian media should be taken to be true. We publish these items so that you gain a better understanding of the official Kremlin narrative and have a sense of what Russians are being told and might believe. Younger and more digitally savvy Russians understand how to use anonymizing browsers to access the free Internet; older Russians are about as likely to know how to do this as your parents are.

Note: We have used the word “LABELED” to indicate that the columnist has been legally designated a “foreign agent.”

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