Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Photo: EPA-EFE/PAVEL BEDNYAKOV / KREMLIN POOL / POOL
Russia must have “total freedom of information”, but only after the war in Ukraine ends, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with state news agency TASS on Friday.
“I don’t think you can restrict information,” Peskov said, noting however that “during wartime, … restrictions and censorship are justified”. While he described Russia as being “in a state of war”, despite the Russian authorities preferring not to use the term for the invasion of Ukraine, he added that once the war was over, “there should be complete freedom of information.”
Peskov also accused “even the most respected international media outlets” of “telling untruths” in their reports. “This is bad, in this respect, we must not be like them in any way,” he added, before praising TASS, which has repeatedly published Russian military propaganda, for “telling the truth in a reasoned way … both at home and abroad”.
Press freedom has been progressively wiped out in Russia since the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. At least 37 journalists, among them Novaya Gazeta’s Anna Politkovskaya, have been killed in the course of their work, and hundreds have been arrested over the past two decades, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimated in 2022.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost all independent media outlets in the country have been banned, and any dissenting voices have been branded “foreign agents” or “undesirable organisations”, while the media outlets that remain in the country are subject to strict military censorship. In 2024, Russia was ranked 162nd out of 180 countries on RSF’s Press Freedom Index.
Under a decade-old law, any organisation that displeases the Kremlin can simply be classified an “undesirable” organisation, immediately compelling it to dissolve itself as a legal entity in Russia. More than two-thirds of the organisations deemed “undesirable” have been given the designation since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022 — among them Novaya Gazeta Europe.
