Russia opens criminal case against famous YouTuber for breaking ‘foreign agent’ rules

The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office has opened a criminal case against Russian journalist and YouTuber Yury Dud for failing to follow rules required of him by law as a “foreign agent”, it announced on Monday.

According to the prosecutors, Dud had distributed material without specifying that he had been designated a “foreign agent”. Dud has already been fined twice this year on the same charge.

The Justice Ministry added Dud, who no longer resides in Russia, to its list of “foreign agents” on 15 April 2022, though he stopped adding the “foreign agent” banner to his work in March 2024.

Dud launched his YouTube channel, vDud, in 2017, where he conducts long-form interviews with individuals from Russia and other post-Soviet states. The channel currently has over 10 million subscribers.

Under Russian law, any person or organisation deemed to have received funding from abroad or to be under “foreign influence” must register as a “foreign agent”. Being designated a foreign agent subjects the individual to onerous requirements and the label has been routinely abused by the authorities to intimidate and punish Kremlin critics and independent journalists.

In mid-May, a Russian court demanded that Dud remove part of an interview with designer Artemy Lebedev in which the latter swore as he referred to the head of Russia’s Safe Internet League Yekaterina Mizulina. The court found that their statements offended her honour and fined Lebedev 300,000 rubles (€3,300), while Dud was fined 200,000 rubles (€2,200).