Media freedom in Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Media freedom in Russia exists on paper but collapses in practice. Article 29 of the Russian constitution guarantees freedom of the press and explicitly prohibits censorship. Yet as of the most recent Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, Russia ranked 164th out of 180 countries. The gap between constitutional promise and lived reality is the central story here. How did a country with more than 40,000 print publications and thousands of broadcast outlets end up being described as more dangerous for journalists than it was during the Cold War? How does a government control speech without officially banning it? And who pays the price when a reporter asks the wrong question? These are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Architecture of Control

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  As of 2009, the Russian government owned 60% of newspapers and, in whole or in part, all national television stations. That figure alone tells a structural story, but ownership is only one instrument in a much larger toolkit. The three main federal television channels, Channel One, Russia TV, and NTV, between them cover the overwhelming majority of Russian territory. Channel One reaches 98.8% of the country; Russia TV reaches 98.5%; NTV covers 84%. All three are controlled by the state, either through direct ownership or through the state-controlled energy company Gazprom. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, major shareholders in Channel One and NTV respectively, sold their stakes to the government and Gazprom in 2000-2001. A media outlet owned by Berezovsky, TV6, was then closed in 2002 through a legal loophole. In 2003 its successor channel, TVS, was shut down citing financial difficulties. Over five years between 2011 and 2016, the government forced ownership changes in more than a dozen significant newsrooms that had been associated with independent reporting. The outlets affected included RBC, Forbes Russia, Lenta.ru, TV Rain, RIA Novosti, and Kommersant. RIA Novosti was disbanded and its resources transferred to a newly created body that became Russia Today. TV Rain was removed from broadcast television and restricted to operating as an internet-only station. Governmental control is also exercised through the distribution of state subsidies and advertising revenues, giving the state economic levers that supplement its legal ones. Political scientist Yevgenia Albats described one mechanism directly: directors of television channels and newspapers, she said, were invited every Thursday to the Kremlin office of deputy head of administration Vladislav Surkov to learn what news should be presented and how.

• 3. Weapons Made of Law

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  Russia's constitution forbids censorship, but the legal system offers other routes. The definition of "extremism" in Russian law is deliberately broad. Since 2009, law enforcement agencies, most notably the FSB, have used anti-extremism statutes to suppress corruption investigations, block protests, and silence criticism of local officials. Under these laws, reposting an article online can result in a prison sentence. A man named Andrei Bubayev was jailed for two years for reposting a picture of a toothpaste tube with the slogan "squeeze Russia out of yourself" alongside an article arguing that Crimea belongs to Ukraine. In June 2015, the poet Alexandr Byvshev, whose works had already been banned as extremist, was placed on the official federal list of terrorists and extremists maintained by the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring. A spontaneous collective condemnation campaign was launched against him in his village, described by independent media as Soviet-esque. In 2015, the Russian government raised the maximum fine for publishing extremist content to one million rubles, equivalent to roughly $16,069 at then-current exchange rates. That same year, articles by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and applied it to the Ukrainian Holodomor, were added to the federal index of extremist materials. A 1961 chemistry textbook was also banned after a court ruled that a chapter on ketone synthesis undermined national security. In February 2016, police in Saint Petersburg confiscated an entire print run of a book by Polish wartime author Jan Nowak-Jezioranski because of its allegedly extremist references to Nazi-Soviet collaboration during World War II. In 2019, Russia introduced what became known as the fake news law, which criminalizes publications containing information deemed unreliable, and opinions deemed disrespectful toward the government, state symbols, or institutions. In 2020, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta was fined 60,000 rubles under this law for disputing the officially declared mortality statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 4. Journalists Under Threat

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  Concern about killings of journalists in Russia intensified sharply after Anna Politkovskaya was shot in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on the 7th of October 2006. Politkovskaya was known internationally for her reporting on Russia's actions in Chechnya and on the pro-Russian Chechen government. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 50 journalists murdered for their professional activity in Russia since 1992, placing Russia third among the deadliest countries for journalists in the 1992-2006 period: 30 killed between 1993 and 2000, and 20 more since then. The Glasnost Defence Foundation documented, in 2005 alone, seven suspicious deaths, 63 assaults on journalists, 12 attacks on editorial offices, 382 lawsuits, 47 cases of detention by the militsiya, and 344 other violations of journalist rights. In August 2014, publisher and opposition politician Lev Shlosberg was attacked and left unconscious; he attributed the assault to his newspaper's investigations into the deployment of Russian soldiers from Pskov to Ukraine. That same month, investigative reporter Aleksandr Krutov was beaten in Saratov, the fourth such attack in his 20-year career. On the 30th of July 2018, journalist Orkhan Dzhemal, film director Alexander Rastorguev, and cameraman Kirill Radchenko were killed in the Central African Republic while filming a documentary on illegal Russian military activity there. In August 2020, prominent opposition figure and journalist Alexei Navalny was poisoned and nearly died. The Russian government refused to open an investigation. Remembrance Day of Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty in Russia is observed every year on the 15th of December.

• 5. Prosecutions and Prison Terms

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  Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by the FSB on the 29th of March 2023 on espionage charges, becoming the first American journalist arrested in Russia since the Cold War. He was not alone. On the 4th of March 2022, President Putin signed legislation imposing prison terms of up to 15 years for anyone who publishes what authorities designate as knowingly false information about the Russian military. Within days, several outlets had already stopped reporting on Ukraine. On the 22nd of March 2022, television journalist Alexander Nevzorov was charged under this law after reporting that Russian forces had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Siberian journalist Mikhail Afanasyev, editor-in-chief of Novy Fokus and a two-time winner of the Andrei Sakharov Prize for journalism, was detained in April 2022 and ultimately sentenced to 5.5 years in prison in September 2023. In February 2023, journalist Maria Ponomarenko was sentenced to six years in prison for publishing information about the Mariupol theatre airstrike. In June 2023, Ilya Krasilshchik, former publisher of the independent outlet Meduza, was sentenced in absentia to eight years for spreading false information about the military. Former state television employee Marina Ovsyannikova was sentenced in absentia to 8.5 years on the 4th of October 2023 for the same charge. On the 6th of March 2024, journalist Roman Ivanov was sentenced to seven years in prison. In March 2024, Russian authorities arrested six journalists from independent outlets, including Antonina Favorskaya, who had filmed what turned out to be the last video of Alexei Navalny before his death. In April 2024, journalists Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, who had worked for Deutsche Welle and other international outlets, were arrested on extremism charges. In June 2024, a Moscow court issued arrest warrants for IStories editor-in-chief Roman Anin and TV Rain correspondent Ekaterina Fomina; Fomina noted that the warrant would restrict her ability to travel to any country that might extradite her to Russia.

• 6. The Internet Frontier

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  Russia's System of Operational-Investigatory Measures, known as SORM, requires all telecommunications operators to install FSB-provided hardware that allows the agency to monitor users' communications, including phone calls, email, and web browsing, without a warrant. In 2014, the system was expanded to cover social media platforms, and operators were ordered to install equipment with deep packet inspection capability. The European Court of Human Rights found Russia's SORM legislation in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Zakharov v. Russia ruling of 2015. The so-called Bloggers Law of 2014 requires web services to store the data of Russian citizens on servers inside the country, and requires operators of free Wi-Fi hotspots, including cafes and libraries, to collect and verify the passport details of every user. The Yarovaya Law of 2016 extended these obligations: telecom operators must store recordings of phone calls, text messages, and internet traffic for up to six months, and metadata for up to three years, all available to authorities without a court order. In April 2013, Pavel Durov, founder of the social network Vkontakte, announced he would resign and leave Russia after refusing FSB demands to hand over data on Ukrainian activists. By September 2014, Vkontakte had been taken over by the company mail.ru, owned by Kremlin-friendly businessman Alisher Usmanov. The blacklist law introduced in 2012 was originally presented as a child-protection measure; by 2013 it had been amended to include content suspected of extremism, and it was subsequently used to block pages belonging to opposition figures Alexei Navalny and Garri Kasparov during the 2014 annexation of Crimea. By 2025, Vladimir Putin had begun cutting Russia off from the global internet more systematically, with YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and foreign news agency websites among those blocked.

• 7. War and the Media Shutdown

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  On the 1st of March 2022, Russian authorities blocked access to Echo of Moscow and TV Rain, which had been Russia's last independent television station, on grounds that they were spreading false information about military operations. Roskomnadzor simultaneously ordered media organizations to delete any stories describing Russia's actions in Ukraine as an assault, an invasion, or a declaration of war. The same agency launched investigations against Novaya Gazeta, MediaZona, New Times, and other outlets for publishing what it called inaccurate information about shelling and civilian casualties. On the 4th of March 2022, access to BBC News Russian, Voice of America, RFE/RL, Deutsche Welle, Meduza, Facebook, and Twitter was blocked. Novaya Gazeta, its editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, TV Rain, and CEO Natalya Sindeyeva filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights on the 3rd of March 2022. On the 8th of March 2022, that court directed the Russian government to stop blocking Novaya Gazeta's activities and to refrain from actions that would deprive the outlet of its rights under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Lenta.ru case from 2014 had already previewed this pattern: after the outlet published an interview with a member of Right Sector, Roskomnadzor issued a warning; the following day, the owner replaced the editor with a pro-government appointee, and 40 employees resigned in protest. War reporter Arkadiy Babchenko described Russian mass media's role in the conflict in Donbas as, in his words, the first war in history started exclusively by Goebbels-like propaganda. In September 2024, in an interview with the Mongolian newspaper Onoodor, Putin insisted that freedom of speech was flourishing in Russia, saying the country was well aware of the need for pluralism and openness.