Russian media giant Demyan Kudryavtsev has been stripped of his Russian citizenship

Media owner Demyan Kudryavtsev was stripped of his Russian citizenship on February 2, 2017, according to a letter from the Interior Ministry to Kudryavtsev, obtained by the news agency RBC. Documents also show that Kudryavtsev voluntarily surrendered his Russian passport on March 16.

Kudryavtsev has refused to comment on the story, though a source close to him confirmed to Meduza that the prominent media owner has indeed lost his Russian citizenship.

Currently, Kudryavtsev’s Israeli citizenship allows him to remain in Russia for up to 90 days without a visa. According to RBC’s sources, this period has nearly expired and Kudryavtsev will soon be forced to return to Israel, though Meduza’s source claims that Kudryavtsev has no plans to go back to Israel. He reportedly hopes to resolve his citizenship dispute in Russia before he’s ordered to leave the country.

In the past, Kudryavtsev has claimed that Russian migration officials started “persecuting” him after he began the process of acquiring the newspaper Vedomosti in 2015.

The first reports claiming that Kudryavtsev might lose his Russian citizenship because of a forged passport emerged in February this year, and the businessman later verified that Russia’s Federal Migration Service found incomplete data in his documents and won a lawsuit against him. Kudryavtsev has insisted, however, that officials never completed the process required to strip him of his Russian citizenship.

• Demyan Kudryavtsev is one of the best known managers in the Russian media. His family owns the business newspaper Vedomosti and several other news outlets, including The Moscow Times. Russian federal law limits foreign ownership of mass media outlets to 20 percent, prohibiting foreigners from being the founders of mass media outlets.