Russia labels international media as foreign agents

Russia’s parliament, the Duma, has unanimously approved a bill designating all international media outlets as “foreign agents”, a retaliatory response to similar actions taken by the US Congress against Russia’s state-funded news channel.

RT, formerly Russia Today, was forced to register with the US Justice Department earlier this week after allegations it served as a Kremlin tool to interfere in last year’s presidential election.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin strongly criticised the US treatment of RT as an attack on freedom of speech and warned that Russia would retaliate.

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Speaking during Wednesday’s parliamentary debate, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin described the new legislation as a “symmetrical answer” to the US and a signal that “our media can’t be treated like that”.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dimitry Peskov, said the legislation will provide the necessary framework for the government to retaliate to any foreign action against the Russian media, but refrained from detailing how the bill would be applied or enforced.

While the law “could require designated media outlets to disclose where they get their funding and how they spend it”, it will apply only to foreign media and not Russian media with foreign funding, says The Guardian.

CBS News says “the broadly phrased bill will leave it to the Russian government to determine which foreign media outlets would be designated as foreign agents”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, sought to distance Germany from the US saying: “It is completely unacceptable if German and European media are - as a consequence of a Russian-American controversy - to be subjected to restrictions which ... go against international obligations that we took together.”

Outlets singled out as foreign agents will face similar requirements to those currently applied to foreign-funded charities under a 2012 law.

Passed in the wake of massive anti-Kremlin protests, the controversial legislation requires all groups that receive foreign funding and engage in vaguely defined political activities to register as foreign agents.