Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor has asked Telegram channel Baza, which is frequently described as having close ties to Russia’s security agencies, to remove 17 posts, according to a statement issued by the channel’s editorial team on Wednesday evening.
The editors noted that while Baza has previously received content removal requests from the media regulator, these typically involved just one or two posts, were relatively infrequent and touched on issues such as reporting methods used in suicides. This latest request, they said, marked a new threshold, however.
“A demand to delete 17 posts at once — some of which arguably contain information of public importance — is, without a doubt, a record,” the editorial team wrote, adding that they would meet the request, despite not agreeing with the reasoning behind it, as “who are we to argue?"
The channel listed nine of the posts in question, the subject matter of which includes the 2023 rebellion led by the late Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russia’s ongoing mobilisation efforts, a Ukrainian airstrike on an airbase in Crimea, and one story about a conscript who happened to share the name Georgy Zhukov with the top Soviet military commander in World War II.
On April 1, the editor-in-chief of Ostorozhno Novosti, a media outlet founded by TV presenter and former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, reported that Roskomnadzor had also demanded the removal of a post about the shelling of Kharkiv, suggesting that it might have been “a consequence of the new register for blogs with more than 10,000 subscribers”.
Telegram remains a vital source of independent news for many in Russia, despite the platform coming under increasing pressure from the authorities to censor certain channels. Concerns were raised in particular earlier this month when Telegram removed an anonymously-run Russian Telegram channel known for sharing leaks from the Russian security services without warning.
