<a href="https://novayagazeta-ru.translate.goog/articles/2022/03/01/o-rabote-v-usloviiakh-voennogo-vremeni?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp" rel="nofollow">https://novayagazeta-ru.translate.goog/articles/2022/03/01/o...</a><p>"Today, the Russian parliament finally introduced military censorship without actually declaring it. For “disseminating knowingly false information about the use of the Russian Armed Forces,” we, news journalists, can get up to 15 years in the camps. “Knowingly false” information is information about prisoners, killed, shelling of civilians in Ukraine. We are asked to admit that none of this happened.<p>Yes, we can say that the path to free journalism is through barracks and barbed wire. All this is very beautiful, but insane nonsense."
Some context: Novaya Gazeta is one of the most important independent media that suffer an incredible pressure from the government. A lot of its journalist has been killed (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta#Deaths_of_journalists" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta#Deaths_of_journa...</a>), and they constantly receives a threats and acts of vandalism.<p>So, this is very sad but inevitable due to new regulation decision.
With all this prosecution and attacks on journalists I hope that the Assange case gets a new light shined on it.<p>It may not be the appropriate time or some may claim whataboutism but Assange exposed a war crime just as these journalists in Russia are currently exposing in Ukraine.<p>I am not saying America is the same but I am saying that all journalists should have protection from prosecution when exposing crimes irregardless where or whom committed them.
I remember a post by the BBC a couple of days ago touting how many visitors they get from Russia. I wonder if that was such a wise thing to do. These types of measures were likely inevitable, but I wonder if that blog accelerated it. Mostly because I have a lot of faith in human incompetence, and maybe Kremlin would not have noticed anything for far longer had the BBC not gifted them data analytics with a bowtie.
To add a background: independent from government (they were controlled by the previous generation of the oligarchs) journalism was "encouraged" to leave Russia some twenty years ago. Some landed jobs in Ukraine.<p>These don't disagree with the government, they just complain, that it's very inconvenient to report facts that at any moment later could be arbitrarily labeled "fake" or "disinformation".
There must be many so tired of being forced into complicity. I wonder what would happen if unwilling media, instead of either trying to ride the edge, give up and parrot the lies or give up and close would do a soft refusal? E.g. by completely switching to something as obviously apolitical as detailed reports from the daily lives of their pet cats. If everybody not keen on signaling loyalty to the end would do that, would the Putinocracy have the structures required to quickly replace them, or to lock them up for writing about cats?