Faced with censorship in Moscow, how to inform the Russians?

“Our goal is to give Russians access to non-partisan and reliable news coverage”. In common grandstand published Thursday, March 10, three major Danish, Finnish and Swedish dailies have announced the translation into Russian of part of their articles on the war in Ukraine, in order to be able to reach the public in Russia.

“The tragedy in Ukraine should not be communicated to the Russian public through propaganda channels”plead the editors-in-chief of the reference dailies Politics (Denmark), Today’s News (Sweden) and Helsingin sanomat newspaper (Finland)

Counter censorship

On March 4, the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, passed a law that might punish up to fifteen years in prison for the dissemination of“false information regarding the Russian army, especially if it has serious consequences for the armed forces”.

→ ANALYSIS. ‘No one knows what we are allowed to publish’: Russia criminalizes press work

Faced with pressure from Russian opposition media, such as the news site Mediazone, the Dojd television channel and Ekho Moskvy radio (Echo of Moscow) have declared that they are suspending their activities. Several foreign media also stopped covering the conflict on the spot and the social network Facebook was blocked.

To counter the Kremlin monopoly, the Scandinavian media therefore announced the Russian translation “from 1 to 3” of their articles as well as their online distribution, “on social media and other channels in order to reach as many Russians as possible”.

The Financial Times switches its articles to open access.

After having interrupted its broadcasts, the Russian-speaking antenna of the English channel BBC finally reconsidered its decision on Tuesday March 8. “We have decided to resume reporting in English from Russia (…) », said the British public broadcasting group in a press release. The British daily Financial Times has meanwhile decided to put online for free “the main ones” articles relating to the war in Ukraine “in order to keep everyone informed of the development of events”.

As Moscow has reduced access to the social network Twitter, the company has announced that a version of its service will now be specially designed for Tor « Onion »a network dedicated to protecting privacy and circumventing censorship.

This service “provides more privacy, integrity, trust, and ‘unblocking’ to people around the world who use Twitter to communicate,” explained on his Twitter account Alec Muffettean American engineer who helped launch it.