The Kremlin has accused the United States of applying unacceptable pressure on Russian media after Washington announced sanctions against journalists and state media networks.
On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the U.S. It is trying to ensure that Russia’s perspective on world affairs is not available to the public.
“Washington doesn’t even acknowledge that there should be alternatives for anyone to get news from our perspective. This is nothing but obvious pressure. We strongly condemn this attitude as unacceptable,” he said.
The US Department of Justice on Thursday accused Russian TV contributor Dmitry Sims and his wife, Anastasia Sims, of plans to violate US sanctions, a day after indicting two employees of Russian state broadcaster RT. RT approved and its top editors, accusing him of trying to influence the US presidential election in November.
RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and her deputy, Elizaveta Brodskaya, are among the 10 individuals and two entities sanctioned by the Treasury Department on Wednesday.
“Washington continues to try to put pressure on Russia, on Russian citizens and also on the Russian media, which is engaged in informing both the citizens inside our country and the public opinion of the world, from our perspective, about what is happening,” Peskov said. said
Simis was allegedly convicted of receiving more than $1m and a personal car and driver in exchange for work he did for Russia’s Channel One from June 2022. The network was sanctioned by the US in 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The allegations come at a time of renewed concern about Russian efforts to interfere in upcoming US elections using online corruption and propaganda.
Peskov said Moscow would respond by imposing its own restrictions on US media outlets inside Russia.
“A symmetrical response is not possible. There is no state news agency in the US, and there is no state TV channel in the US,” Peskov told the state news agency RIA Novosti.
“But there will definitely be measures that will ban their media from broadcasting their information,” he said.
When asked about the sanctions at his daily news briefing, Peskov said Russia would consider how it covers the Ukraine conflict.
“Some of them … present information one-sidedly and are not afraid of fake news. We will take all this into account,” said the Kremlin spokesman.
Peskov did not say what sanctions Russia would impose against US media.
Most US media outlets have already downsized their staff or pulled out of Russia when Moscow launched a war in Ukraine due to legislation targeting independent reporting on the conflict.
Meanwhile, Peskov justified Moscow’s unprecedented censorship during the war in a rare acknowledgment of Russia’s tight grip on information.
“In the state of war we are in, sanctions are justified and so is censorship,” he told state news agency TASS in separate comments.
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