Roskomnadzor blocked the new website of Echo, which was restarted after the liquidation of the radio station and the website of Echo of Moscow.
The blocking occurred at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office on the basis of Article 15.3 of the Law “On Information”, which regulates the restriction of access to prohibited content with calls for mass riots, participation in unauthorized actions and extremism, as well as “fakes”.
On September 29, project manager Maxim Kournikov announced that the Ekho Moskvy radio station would restart the media under the name Echo. According to him, the new media will technologically combine the content produced by the former journalists of the radio station. Before that, Kournikov had already said that Living Nail, Dilettant, and the airs of Alexander Plushev and Tatyana Felgenhauer would join Echo.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia demanded to restrict access to the Ekho Moskvy website and blocked radio broadcasts due to the fact that the site “publishes false information about the actions of the Russian military as part of a special operation to protect the DPR and LPR.” The Board of Directors decided to liquidate the radio channel and the website.
Roskomnadzor, in turn, demanded that the Russian media use only the wording "special operation" when covering events. After the introduction of the law on “fakes” about the Russian army, The Insider, Radio Liberty, Current Time, Krym.Realii, Voice of America, New Times, Taiga.info, DOXA, Ekho Moskvy were blocked ”, “Rain”, “Medusa”, BBC Russian Service, Deutsche Welle and other independent media. In most cases, the Prosecutor General's Office was the initiator of the blocking. The human rights project Roskomsvoboda reported that more than 5,000 publications had been blocked since the beginning of the war.