The Ministry of Justice of Russia has added two organizations to the list of mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent. This is reported on the official website departments.
It is noted that Moscow Digital Media, the publisher of the Republic, and the joint-stock company RS-Balt, which is the legal entity of the Rosbalt publication, were included in the register.
Earlier it became known that the ANO for the protection of human rights and informing the population “Yakutia – Our Opinion” was included in the list of foreign media agents. The Ministry of Justice explained that the organization was created by a Russian individual, previously entered in the register, Stepan Petrov.
Prior to that, the Ministry of Justice included nine more journalists and three companies on the list. Galina Arapova, Tatiana Voltskaya, Andrey Zakharov, Ekaterina Klepikovskaya, Roman Perl, Evgeny Simonov, Elena Solovieva, Daniil Sotnikov and Elizaveta Surnacheva were included in the register. In addition, the list included LLC “MEMO”, the American company Mason GES Anonymous Foundation, which is the owner of the online publication mnews.world, as well as a company registered in the Netherlands, Stichting Bellingcat.
In August, employees of a number of publications wrote an open appeal to the Russian authorities. In it, the journalists demanded to abolish the law on foreign agents, as well as to reconsider the decisions to close the publications of their colleagues. A few weeks after the appeal, the Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko said that the law on foreign agents was not planned to be canceled. At the same time, she made it possible to correct it.