Originally published 2022-03-03.
In the first week of March 2022, days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, two of the country’s best-known independent news outlets were forced off the air. The TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain) and the radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) were cut off on 1 March for their war coverage, and both had stopped operating inside Russia by 3 March. A day later parliament passed a law that made spreading “false information” about the army punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
How the two outlets were silenced
On 1 March 2022 Russia’s prosecutor general asked the media regulator, Roskomnadzor, to restrict access to both outlets. Prosecutors accused them of spreading deliberately false information about the actions of Russian troops and of calling for protests. Roskomnadzor blocked TV Rain’s website and took Ekho Moskvy off the air the same day.
Two days later Ekho Moskvy’s board of directors voted to close the station. Its frequency was soon handed to the state-run Radio Sputnik. TV Rain announced it was suspending work, and its staff signed off on air with the words “No to war”.
Officially, the authorities did not ban the outlets for criticism. They framed it as a fight against “fakes”, the term the state used for any reporting that contradicted the defence ministry.
Who TV Rain and Ekho Moskvy were
Ekho Moskvy first went on air on 22 August 1990, in the last months of the Soviet Union, and became a symbol of the free press of the 1990s. Oddly, its majority owner by 2022 was Gazprom-Media, part of the state-controlled gas giant. Its long-serving editor-in-chief, Alexei Venediktov, held a minority stake and managed to keep a wide range of voices, from liberals to officials, on air.
TV Rain was founded in 2008 by Natalya Sindeyeva and began broadcasting in 2010. It called itself “the optimistic channel” and became a home for opposition figures and investigative reporting. It had been squeezed off cable networks before, in 2014, and was labelled a “foreign agent” in 2021.
The “false news” law
The State Duma approved the new law on 4 March 2022, and President Vladimir Putin signed it the same day. It added new articles to the criminal code:
- Up to 10 years in prison for publicly spreading what the authorities consider knowingly false information about the use of the armed forces.
- Up to 15 years if such reports lead to “serious consequences”.
- Up to 3 years for “discrediting” the army or calling for sanctions against Russia.
The law does not literally ban the word “war”. In practice, though, Roskomnadzor had already told media to use only official sources and to describe the invasion as a “special military operation”. Calling it a war could be treated as false information, so the effect was much the same. Hundreds of people, from journalists to a Moscow councillor, were later prosecuted under these articles.
International reaction
Western governments condemned the closures. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Kremlin was engaged in “a full assault on media freedom and the truth”. She noted that Russia had also restricted Facebook and Twitter, and pointed to the arrest of thousands of anti-war protesters, more than 7,300 by her count at that point.
Within days the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CBS and Germany’s ARD and ZDF paused reporting from inside Russia while they studied the new law. Russia also blocked the websites of the BBC’s Russian service, RFE/RL and others.
The European Union had moved in the opposite direction on 2 March, suspending broadcasts by the Russian state channels RT and Sputnik across the bloc, arguing they were tools of war propaganda. In the United Kingdom, RT went dark that week after distributors dropped it, and the regulator Ofcom revoked its licence on 18 March 2022.
Life in exile
Neither outlet disappeared. TV Rain moved its team abroad and resumed broadcasting from Riga, Latvia, in July 2022. In December 2022 Latvia’s regulator revoked its licence over several violations, including a map that showed Crimea as part of Russia. The channel moved its newsroom to Amsterdam under a Dutch licence and kept broadcasting on YouTube. Russia declared it an “undesirable organisation” in July 2023, making cooperation with it a crime. In 2025 a Latvian court overturned the licence decision.
Former Ekho Moskvy staff built new projects too. Venediktov and colleagues launched the YouTube channel Zhivoi Gvozd, and in autumn 2022 a group led by former deputy editor Maxim Kurnikov started an online outlet called Echo, broadcasting from Berlin.
Why it matters
The March 2022 closures marked the end of a long squeeze. Independent media in Russia had been pushed to the margins for two decades, through ownership changes, “foreign agent” labels and blocked websites. The war removed the last major outlets with a national audience. Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov had shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, suspended publication later that same month.
The pressure did not stop with the big names. Regional newsrooms, student magazines and independent bloggers were blocked or labelled “foreign agents” in the months that followed, and many journalists left for Latvia, Georgia, Germany and Kazakhstan. Exiled outlets now reach audiences at home mainly online, and their reporters face criminal cases in absentia.
For Russians who want news beyond the state line, the alternatives now mostly come from abroad through VPNs, YouTube and Telegram. For everyone else, the story is a reminder of how quickly a government at war can close the space for reporting, and how much depends on journalists willing to keep working from exile.
Sources: RFE/RL, 5 March 2022: Putin signs law allowing long prison terms for “false news” about army; Wikipedia: TV Rain; Wikipedia: Echo of Moscow; MSN / White House briefing, 2 March 2022.
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