From Bellona.org, Feb. 20:
In a chilling broadside against the independent press, Moscow has
blocked further publication of the Barents Observer, a Norwegian news
portal published in Russian and English, on the Russian Internet.
The move comes just days after Russian lawmakers backed a bill aimed
at isolating the country’s Internet from the rest of the world with the
apparent goal of bolstering Moscow’s cyber defenses.
But the news portal’s publishers, as well as rhetoric from Russian
lawmakers, suggest Moscow’s targeting of the Barents Observer’s online
Russian-language presence was more personal.
For years, the portal has produced reporting on social and
environmental issues concerning residents of Northern Norway and their
Russian counterparts just across the border. And while the portal has
sought to foster political and economic cooperation in the Barents Sea
region, it has also been independent and unsparing in its criticism of
officials in Russia and Norway alike.
The ban of the publication via the Russian-controlled Internet came earlier this week after it ran a January story
about a Swedish gay activist who traced his routes to the Sami people,
an indigenous group inhabiting Northwest Russia and Scandinavia.
The article brought a firestorm of shrill criticism from lawmakers in
Moscow, which in 2013 criminalized the publication of materials seen by
the government as friendly to so-called non-traditional sexual
lifestyles.
Roskomnazdor, Russia’s federal communications authority, fired off a
letter to the Barents Observer demanding it remove the article on the
Swedish activist from its site or face being blocked – which the
portal’s editor, Thomas Nilsen, refused to do.
In the days following, Vitaly Limonov, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s deeply conservative parliament, told the Russian Federal News Service
that the Barents Observer represented “degeneration and decay,” and
demanded the portal be “blocked to hell” on the Russian Internet....MORE
