LLaunched in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the USSR, this publication, disseminated on the Internet in English and Russian, had already been designated as a “foreign agent” in November 2023, forcing most of its contributors to leave the country.
The status of an “undesirable organization” now makes its collaborators liable to criminal prosecution in Russia.
In the recent past, there have been people who have been fined simply for sharing links or articles published by organizations classified as undesirable.
The Moscow Times has already confirmed on the social network Telegram – where it is followed by around 100,000 subscribers – that it had been designated as an “undesirable organization”.
According to the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, the work of The Moscow Times “is aimed at discrediting the decisions of the leadership of the Russian Federation on issues of foreign and domestic policy.”
For the Russian regime, this media outlet “permanently interacts with foreign organizations such as Meduza, The Insider or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which are also already recognized as undesirable in Russia.”
Meduza and The Insider are independent Russian media outlets that have had to leave the country for fear of reprisals from the Kremlin.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a media outlet funded by the US Congress.
“We will continue to work as before: independent journalism is a crime in Putin’s Russia,” Derk Sauer, founder of the Moscow Times, responded on the social network X.
Sauer, a Dutch national, moved the editorial office to Amsterdam after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Many journalists who started working at The Moscow Times continued their careers at major international media outlets, including The New York Times or Agence France Presse.
Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich — who was detained in Russia in March 2023 and is currently on trial on espionage charges — is one of the journalists who went to work for the French news agency in 2020.
The Russian regime continues to tighten its crackdown on any dissenting voice since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Most of the opponents are in exile, in prison or are dead, like Alexei Navalny, who died in prison last February, in circumstances that remain unclear.
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2596144/jornal-critico-do-kremlin-the-moscow-times-interditado-pela-justica-russa
