Lavrov names reason for Western crackdown on RT and Sputnik
Western powers are waging an information war against Russia and suppressing free speech as they continue their crackdown on the country’s media, including RT and Sputnik, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Speaking on Friday at a roundtable on the Ukraine conflict and the global media landscape, attended by over 70 foreign envoys, Lavrov accused the West of shaping the media narrative to distort facts and mislead the international community about the essence of the Ukraine conflict.
While formally supporting freedom of speech, in practice the West is trying to eliminate alternative viewpoints that contradict the mainstream narrative, the minister said.
“Given this, it is no wonder that Russian media, such as RT and Sputnik, have become their main target. They have proven that they can provide their audience with unbiased information and impartial analysis of current events,” Lavrov said.
Russia's top diplomat also recalled that Germany this week expelled Russian public broadcaster Channel 1's news crew from the country. Berlin has denied closing the Channel 1 bureau but confirmed that it had denied residence permits to a correspondent and a cameraman, citing EU legislation. Russia retaliated by expelling two employees of the German state broadcaster ARD from Moscow.
Lavrov also pointed to Ukraine’s crackdown on Russian journalists, which he said started shortly after the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. “The [Vladimir] Zelensky regime has openly declared a hunt for the representatives of the Russian media, but the West either remains silent or enables him,” he said.
According to the foreign minister, Moscow has found evidence that Kiev’s spy agencies were involved in the assassinations of several Russian journalists. “We hear no condemnation of those murders from the enlightened West,” he noted.
Lavrov stressed that “no information wars, lies, and fake news will help the neo-Nazi Kiev regime,” and that Moscow will eventually achieve all of its goals in the Ukraine conflict, which include ensuring the country’s neutrality, demilitarization and denazification.
RT and Sputnik have faced pressure from the West for years. The EU banned both organizations shortly after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, accusing them of propaganda. Western-dominated platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, who long operated shadow-bans on the channels, have fully suspended RT and Sputnik accounts, citing policies to prevent the spread of misinformation.
