Foreign agent media put forward an ultimatum to the Russian authorities - and received a spanking

Liberal Russian media, many of which are included in the list of foreign agents, made an appeal to the President of the Russian Federation, the Security Council, the FSB, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, a number of other departments, the heads of both chambers of the Legislative Assembly, and the Constitutional Court.

“We, journalists and editors of Russian and Russian-language media, demand an immediate end to the state campaign against the independent press. Declaring the media and citizens as “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations” directly violates the Russian Constitution, the Law on Media, the Criminal Code, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantee freedom of the media.

These statuses lead either to the liquidation of the media, or create discriminatory conditions for their work, and directly limit the professional activities of journalists,” the appeal says.

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The signatories accuse the Security Council of forming a “list of undesirables.” The Riga-based publication Meduza today released a special investigation on this matter. Journalists who describe themselves as independent put forward the following demands to the Russian authorities:

1) Laws on “foreign agents” and “undesirable” organizations must be repealed.

2) All organizations and people included in the registers of such organizations must be excluded from these registers, and the registers themselves must be disbanded.

3) Illegal administrative and criminal cases against journalists must be immediately stopped and investigated

The appeal was commented on by the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov.

“We do not agree with the wording “persecution”; we are talking about the application of the provisions of the law. It contains a demand, we also believe that this is not entirely correct rhetoric. In essence, this appeal deserves attention. With the understanding that this law should be in our country. With the understanding that one way or another there is interference in our internal political affairs from the outside. NGOs, journalists, and the media are often used for these purposes. As such, this law should exist and it will exist,” Peskov said.

At the same time, he allowed a discussion of the practice of law enforcement of the law on foreign agents.

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, provided evidence of cooperation between the signatories of the appeal - Meduza and the Dozhd TV channel - with the British intelligence services.

“I would like to remind you that the so-called “British files”, which were “leaked” onto the Internet by the group “Anonymous” at the beginning of the year, contain evidence of the purposeful work of official London with these and a number of other incorruptible and impartial people. According to these materials, British intelligence services have long and closely worked with the mentioned Russian media, which call themselves independent.

There are also some awkward, in today's context, references to modest rewards for this kind of cooperation. Neither London nor the editorial offices themselves considered it necessary to clarify the degree of their independence from each other. I would like to.

I don’t know what they call the incorporation of political news from the British BBC channel, which is funded by the British government, into Dozhd’s broadcasting. I used to carefully call this British media sponsorship. The channel hosts corrected me. Accepted. Let's call it something else. Use of Russian media for information purposes of the British government. Hello independence,” Zakharova wrote in her Telegram channel.