The amount of fines imposed on “foreign agents” exceeded 1 billion rubles

The total amount of fines imposed by Roskomnadzor on participants in the register of “foreign agents” for the lack of appropriate marking on the materials published by them exceeded 1 billion 17 million rubles, the agency said.

Roskomnadzor noted that most of the fines were imposed on Radio Svoboda and the director of its Russian division, Andrei Shary: from 2021, the courts fined them a total of 988.5 million rubles.

In addition, according to Yevgeny Zaitsev, head of Roskomnadzor’s department for control and supervision in the field of electronic communications, the department has blocked more than 4.2 thousand sites and individual materials of “undesirable organizations”.

• The Law on Foreign Agents was adopted in Russia in 2012. It allowed the authorities to recognize as a “foreign agent” any non-commercial organization that received money from abroad and conducted, from the authorities’ point of view, political activities. The criteria by which such activity is determined are not clearly defined in the law, which allowed the authorities to pursue independent mass media, organizations working in the fields of education, culture, health care, and ecology.
• Later, the law was tightened several times, expanded its effect on private individuals, and also introduced as a punishment not only large fines, but also long terms of imprisonment.