President Vladimir Putin said Western countries were openly oppressing Russian journalists in remarks published on Monday, days after Moscow banned dozens of American reporters from entering the country.
“In order to avoid inconvenient facts and truthful information, the West, which considers itself the standard of freedom, has launched open persecution against Russian reporters,” Putin told Mongolian newspaper Onudor on the eve of his visit to the country, according to a transcript provided on the Kremlin website.
His comments came after Moscow said on Wednesday it was banning 92 US citizens, including journalists, lawyers and heads of major military-industrial companies, from entering Russia over what Moscow described as Washington’s anti-Russia stance.
They also follow years of suppression of independent media by the Kremlin and Moscow’s increasingly blocking of dissenting voices in Russian-language media outlets at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Putin said that the media is free in Russia.
“The only requirement for them is compliance with Russian law,” he said. “Foreign correspondents accredited in our country must understand this.”
Russia has often accused Western countries of imposing unfair restrictions on its media abroad, including bans on some state-backed news outlets.
Putin told a Mongolian newspaper that Russian journalists face “direct censorship” in almost all Western countries.
“The only thing our media does is to reliably express the Russian point of view on current modern problems and processes in the world,” Putin said.
In May, Russian lawmakers passed a bill giving prosecutors the power to shut down foreign media bureaus in Moscow if a Western country was “unfriendly” to Russian media.
Washington has imposed sanctions on some state-run Russian TV stations that it says have spread misinformation to fuel Russia’s war in Ukraine.
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