The Kremlin continued a pre-election clampdown on the media on Friday by introducing serious legal restrictions on two media outlets, including the country’s most prominent opposition TV station.
TV Rain and IStories will now both live with a "foreign agent" designation that massively increases stakes for advertisers, business partners, and sources. Six journalists from the latter publication, all highly skilled investigative reporters, additionally found themselves subjected to personal sanctions.
While expected in the context of an increasingly repressive information policy, the move comes as a serious blow to the few pockets of independent journalism that remain in the country.
TV Rain has lived a precarious existence since starting broadcasting in 2010, at a time when the Kremlin had established complete control over television.
In 2014, the self-styled “optimistic channel” was cut off from cable networks and associated advertising, forcing it to move to the internet. It rediscovered profit on the back of protests and live YouTube broadcasting. That appears to have sharpened resistance to its journalism.
In June, the Kremlin barred Anton Zhelnov, TV Rain’s longtime correspondent, from the official presidential pool.
Director and producer Vera Krichevskaya, who helped found the channel 11 years ago, told The Independent that TV Rain had always managed to stay "one step away from its death”.
Her new film — entitled bluntly enough "F@ck This Job" — documents the most dramatic moments of the channel’s tortured history by telling the story of its founder Natalya Sindeyeva. The film is set to be broadcast next year in the UK by BBC Storyville.
Ms Krichevskaya said she had no doubts the station’s "committed" journalists would find a way of muddling through. "You can’t break the spirits of Natalya or the team whatever you throw at them — that’s the essence of the film I shot,” she said.
IStories, a muckraking not-for-profit media registered in Latvia, has meanwhile attracted the attention of authorities from its inception. Several of the publication’s journalists formed part of the Panama papers team.
In April, police raided its editorial offices and the home of its 34 year old editor Roman Anin after he was reported by the wife of Putin all-powerful ally Igor Sechin. The complaint relates to a 2016 story, written by Mr Anin, then working for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, in which he reported Mrs Sechina had holidayed on a £70 million yacht.
In a message for readers on social media, IStories said that it had never hidden the fact that it was registered abroad.
"As regards the list of foreign agents," the message read, "it now contains so many decent people and publications, that not to be included would be indecent."
The elections take place in mid-September.
