Independent radio station forced to hand over a list of its online editors to federal agents

The independent radio station Echo of Moscow has complied with orders from the Federal Security Service to hand over a list of all employees “responsible for administering and moderating the [station's] website,” according to Alexey Venediktov, Echo's chief editor.

Federal agents recently seized correspondence between Echo's editorial staff and the publicist Andrei Piontkovsky. The station's online chief editor, Vitaly Ruvinsky, has been called in for questioning, as well.

In January 2016, Echo of Moscow's website published an article by Andrei Piontkovsky titled “The Bomb That's Ready to Explode,” with a final paragraph calling on the Russian Federation to jettison the Chechen Republic. These controversial lines were deleted from the article, shortly after it was published, but federal prosecutors later announced that the article contained elements of extremism, after inspecting the text at the request of members of parliament.