Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova over ongoing repression of Russian media and journalists
The unceremonious deportation of Rossiyskaya Gazeta correspondent Alexander Gasyuk from the Republic of Cyprus, which was preceded by an operation by the special services to put psychological pressure on the journalist and his family and which culminated the a violent beating of the media representative, resulting in bodily harm, became another stage in the collective West’s coordinated campaign to totally suppress any alternative sources of information in its media space.
The neoliberal western pseudo-democracies were not satisfied with numerous bans on broadcasts of Russian TV and radio channels, blocking internet portals, terminating access to social and financial electronic services for Russian citizens, closing Russian media press centres and imposing hundreds of sanctions against media representatives. The largest internet monopolies, registered in the US, joined the information war, launched by the West, blocking unwelcome users and information resources en masse and limiting access to them as they saw fit or at the behest of Washington.
Repression continues unabated to suppress the remaining sources of uncomfortable truths, with most vile and violent methods used. Dissidence is suppressed under false pretexts of care about information security and a fight against disinformation. In the few last months alone, a number of incidents were registered in the so-called advanced democracies, involving gross violation of their international obligations to protect the of rights of journalists and ensure pluralism of the mass media. Here are just a few of them: the licences of RT Balkan, Oriental Review, Tsragrad, Katehon and New Eastern Outlook were suspended in the EU; the list of unwelcome journalists, military correspondents and heads of the Russian media was substantially extended; Russia News Editor-in-Chief Yekaterina Nadolskaya was denied access to the press conference of the President of France at the G20 Summit in New Delhi; Latvia’s parliament passed a resolution prohibiting the use of the Russian language in public service broadcasts from January 1, 2026.
Ukraine and Moldova are displaying no less eagerness than their western curators in the witch-hunt, having actually established total censorship and a zero-tolerance mode regarding any criticism of the authorities. Head of the Sputnik Moldova information agency Vitaly Denisov was brutally expelled from Chisinau; The Moldovan authorities also blocked five websites of the Sputnik information agency. The Kiev regime has long since shifted to frankly terroristic methods in its fight against dissent, having committed the gruesome murders of Darya Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky, Oleg Klokov and Rostislav Zhuravlev. They long ago stopped abiding by their obligations under international law and even the requirements of basic justice.
This sad state of affairs is indulged by the deathly silence of relevant international structures whose main objective is to prevent such tyranny against the media and ensure equal access to information. Some of these structures have finally crossed the point of no return and discredited their institutions in displaying bias and servile readiness to serve the interests of a narrow group of countries to the detriment of their mandate.
The powerful circles in the countries of the neoliberal West seriously damage their reputation and undermine society’s trust in their institutions with their impudent and two-faced policies, emanating from a hypocritical interpretation of the fundamental principles of democracy. In their attempts to silence the voices of dissent, they neglect the principles of the information society and people’s natural need to form an impartial picture of events, replacing argument with force, thus admitting their powerlessness in the face of truth.
