Against the background of poor bilateral relations, according to a report on state television, the Russian government is not extending the visa for a correspondent for the British broadcaster BBC.
Sarah Rainsford has to leave the country by the end of the month at the latest, Rossiya reported 24.
The move is seen as a response by the Russian authorities to the UK's refusal to license the Russian state broadcaster RT and to “put constant pressure on employees of many other Russian media outlets”.
The BBC did not want to comment on the case on Friday.
Director General Tim Davie later condemned the expulsion in a statement posted on Twitter, describing it as a “direct attack on freedom of the media”.
The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Sakharova, wrote to Telegram that "everything was explained in detail" to representatives of the BBC during a visit to her house.
The repeated warnings from Moscow had not been heeded.
Sakharova spoke of alleged "persecution of Russian journalists" in Great Britain and "visa bullying" in London.
According to Bloomberg, the background is that in 2019 the state intelligence service Tass, citing an unidentified person in Moscow, reported that Great Britain had not issued a visa to several Russian journalists. The Russian ambassador to London, Andrei Kelin, said that Moscow was considering retaliation in response. The move now comes at a time when relations between the two countries appear to have bottomed out.
Rainsford is currently one of two BBC correspondents in Moscow.
Her current visa expires on August 31, according to the report.
The journalist had previously worked in Istanbul, Madrid and Havana.
Most recently, she caused a stir when she asked the ruler of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, at a press conference whether he was still legitimized in view of the violent repression against dissenters in the former Soviet republic.
Rainsford would be the first British female journalist to leave Russia in ten years.
The US journalist David Satter was banned from Russia in 2014.
A Polish correspondent for the daily Gazeta Wyborcza had to leave the country in 2015.
Relations between Russia and Britain are bad. The government in London has repeatedly criticized human rights violations, for example in the case of the imprisoned Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny. Most recently, Moscow imposed sanctions against the British who were not named. The move is the answer to British sanctions. Relations are also strained by the poison attack on former double agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 and Russian warning shots against a British warship off the annexed Crimean peninsula.