Roskomnadzor demanded that the Kazakh publication Vlast remove news about the war in Ukraine, threatening to block the site. However, the editors said that they did not intend to comply with the requirements of the Russian federal service.
The journalists clarified that Vlast is a Kazakhstani publication, so its activities are not regulated by Russian laws and departments. The editors promised to continue covering the war in Ukraine, regardless of what the opinion of the Russian department “responsible for military censorship” is.
In particular, the RKN demanded to remove the news about the shelling of the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa by the Russian military, as a result of which more than 20 people were killed, as well as the news about 22 thousand dead civilians of the annexed Mariupol.
In August, the Kazakhstani edition of Ratel.kz also refused to remove material about the war in Ukraine at the request of Roskomnadzor. Then the RKN threatened to block the resource, Kazakh journalists asked for assistance from their Foreign Ministry.
The RKN regularly requires both Russian and foreign media and resources to remove information objectionable to the Russian authorities, including about the war in Ukraine since February 24. In April, Roskomnadzor sent two notices to the Russian-language Wikipedia demanding the removal of two sections from an article about Russian President Vladimir Putin – "Relations with Ukraine (2012 – present)" and "After the invasion of Ukraine (2022)". In the second, among other things, there is a subsection "Historical analogies with Hitler", where Putin's actions during the war with Ukraine are compared with the actions of the German dictator during World War II. As a result, the World Court of the Tagansky District of Moscow fined the Wikimedia Foundation's managing director of Wikipedia for 2 million rubles.