Europe 1 with AFP 11:35 a.m., March 4, 2022

On Friday, the Russian authorities restricted access to the sites of four independent media, including the local edition of the BBC, further tightening their control over information a week after the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

These decisions were taken at the request of the prosecution on February 24, the day the military operation was launched.

The Russian authorities on Friday restricted access to the sites of four independent media, including the local edition of the BBC, further tightening their control over information a week after the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

According to the Russian media regulator (Roskomnadzor), access to the sites of the Russian-language editions of the BBC and German international radio and television Deutsche Welle (DW), the independent site Meduza and Radio Svoboda, the Russian branch of RFE/RL , was "limited".

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Decisions made on the day the military invasion began

Roskomnadzor indicates that these decisions were taken at the request of the prosecution on February 24, the day on which Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine.

On Friday morning, the homepages of the BBC and Deutsche Welle opened intermittently, but some articles about the war in Ukraine were inaccessible, AFP journalists in Moscow found.

The Meduza and Svoboda homepages were completely inaccessible.

During the night from Thursday to Friday, GlobalCheck, a monitoring service against internet censorship, had already noted problems accessing these sites, as well as the Facebook social network, which has been idling for several days in Russia.

Deutsche Welle, RFE-RL and the Russian-language service of the BBC are financed respectively by Berlin, Washington and London.

In Russia, their journalists regularly publish critical Kremlin investigations.

The BBC site has seen its audience triple

Last month, Deutsche Welle was banned in Russia and its reporters forced to stop working.

But his site continued to function.

The BBC said in a statement "to continue its efforts to ensure that BBC News is available in Russia": "Access to accurate and independent information is a fundamental human right which must not be denied to the Russian people, including millions of rely on BBC News every week".

The BBC's Russian-language news site has seen its audience more than triple, to 10.7 million on average per week since the start of the invasion, compared to the same period last year.

The number of visitors to Russia on the English site bbc.com jumped 252% to 423,000 last week.

Russian power will harden its repressive arsenal

Russia is regularly described by NGOs as one of the most restrictive countries in the world when it comes to press freedom, but the situation has worsened since the beginning of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian authorities notably prohibited the media from using information other than official statements on this subject, and banned the use of words like "war" and "invasion".

On Thursday, after the blocking of their sites by the authorities, the emblematic radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) announced its self-dissolution and the independent television channel Dojd said it was suspending its activity until further notice.

Far from stopping there, the government is preparing to toughen up its repressive arsenal: a bill, which provides for up to 15 years in prison for any publication of "fake news" concerning the Russian army, will be examined on Friday at the Duma, lower house of the Russian Parliament.