The Russian Justice Ministry has declared German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle an “undesirable organization”. This label carries penalties of up to six years in prison for working on the channel and fines, or even imprisonment, for viewers who share “like” dirty news content. The Russian organization did not explain the reasons for the ban on this German federal media group. “This latest attempt to silence free media is a relief from the Russian regime’s blatant disregard for press freedom and exposes its fear of independent reporting,” Deutsche Welle CEO Barbara Massing said before Russia’s veto was confirmed.
“Despite censorship and blocking, Deutsche Welle’s Russian service has more users than ever before,” Massing said in a statement. “We will continue our independent journalistic coverage of the war of aggression against Ukraine and other topics on which information is often not accessible in Russia so that people can form their own opinions,” says the director general of German media.
This permanent ban was the culmination of the Kremlin’s persecution of Deutsche Welle, although arrests during the Western Middle Ages began earlier. In 2021, Moscow expelled Dutch journalist Tom Vennink, from Volkskrantyes the British Sarah Rainsford, from the BBC. When the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Berlin banned the Kremlin’s Russia Today channel from broadcasting in Germany, and Moscow responded by designating the German outlet as a foreign agent. This does not imply a veto, but it limits your work to making it virtually impossible to inform the Russians and the rest of the world. Deutsche Welle eventually ended its co-responsibility, but the Kremlin then classified its Russian journalist Alexánder Smirnov as an individual foreign agent. Today, after several legal reforms, this cataloging could also involve a prison sentence for not being labeled as such on social networks.
Deutsche Welle has decided to stop having collaborators in Russia in 2024, a year in which the Kremlin increased its pressure on European media with the expulsion of several correspondents and the blocking of access to the web pages of 81 periodicals and news agencies, including this newspaper. Without the use of a VPN it remains accessible today, as well as calls via WhatsApp and Signal, YouTube, a service which has been slowed down to the extreme and which the Russian Parliament assured this week would be completely blocked within six months.
The Kremlin launched its “undesirable organizations” law ten years ago, in 2015, to suppress all critical voices. Under the measure, 280 institutions were vetoed, including international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Greenpeace; Russian independent media like New Gazeta Yes Jellyfish ; the norwegian newspaper The Barents Observer; and other European information initiatives, such as Proyecto de Denuncia de la Corrupción y el Crimen Organizado (OCCRP) and Reporteros Sin Fronteras.
Even the simple mention of an organization on the list on social networks carries fines of between 5,000 and 15,000 rubles (approximately 53 to 160 euros), even if a repeat offense or other history justifies the opening of criminal proceedings against the alleged perpetrator.
According to the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Foreign Interference, Vasili Piskariov, Deutsche Welle “conducts anti-Russian propaganda” and “trains disinformation experts through its media academy.” In March 2022, the Russian Parliament approved a law that punishes “discrediting the Russian armed forces” with prison. Decide, disseminate any information on alleged Russian war crimes within the framework of the “special military operation” against Ukraine, the official name of a conflict that the legislator refuses to qualify as an “invasion” or “war”.
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