Roskomnadzor blocked the website of the project “02/24/2022” in Russia. Eyewitnesses,” which collects people’s testimonies about what is happening in their lives after the start of a full-scale invasion. The editor-in-chief of the project, Viktor Muchnik, announced this on his Facebook page.
“Well, dear RKN, thank you for your high assessment of our work. And we, we are... The mirrors are there, VPN, you know. We will work, in general, so that you, Roskomnadzor, also have work. Do not relax! Well, I remind our readers who are on my feed that in addition to VPN there is a cart, YouTube and everything else where you can still watch and read what our Eyewitnesses think and feel on February 24th. About the war, about Putin, about Russia, about Ukraine,” the editor-in-chief commented on the blocking.
The project was created by the team of the Tomsk agency TV2, which stopped working shortly after the blockade in early March. Its purpose is to record people's accounts of what they thought and felt after February 24th. “What changed in their lives after February 24? What do they think about Putin, about the Russian government? What do they see as the cause of the trouble that began on February 24? What are they afraid of, what do they hope for? How do they see the future of Russia and Ukraine?”
- After the start of the war, Roskomnadzor demanded that the media write about the war in Ukraine only with reference to official Russian sources. Journalists were also prohibited from calling the “Russian special operation” an attack, invasion, or declaration of war. Otherwise, the supervisory authority threatened with blocking and fines of up to five million rubles.
- According to Roskomsvoboda, as of December 27, for reasons of military censorship, Roskomnadzor has already blocked more than 9,000 sites, and in total in 2022, 247,492 thousand Internet resources were added to the register of banned sites. “After the start of the ‘special military operation’, we strengthened our counteraction to the spread of calls for extremism and terrorism, mass unrest and ‘fake’ news on the Internet,” Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov previously stated in an interview with Kommersant.