US has declared war on free speech – Russia

The US crackdown on Russian media amounts to a declaration of war on free speech, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday. She described the new sanctions against RT and other news outlets as “repressions unprecedented in scale.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced new sanctions against RT on Friday, accusing it of engaging in “covert influence activities” and “functioning as a de facto arm of Russian intelligence.” Earlier in September, Washington imposed sanctions on RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and three other senior RT employees over alleged attempts to influence the 2024 US presidential election.

“The US has declared war on freedom of speech throughout the world, turning to open threats and blackmail against other states in an effort to set them against the domestic media and establish sole control over the global information space,” Zakharova said, promising that the punitive measures Washington was using to target Russian media would not go unanswered.

She added that accusations of attempts to influence the elections are a mere “witch-hunt” and “spy-o-mania” introduced to manipulate public opinion and bar its citizens from any information that is inconvenient for the state.

The head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, told reporters on Friday that the “broad scope and reach” of RT was one of the reasons many countries around the world did not support Ukraine. The GEC has funded propaganda games aimed at children and forced Twitter to censor pro-Russian content. Rubin admitted last year that he wanted to use the GEC to shut down Russian media outlets around the world.

“We are going to be talking… in Latin America, Africa and Asia… to try to show all of those countries that right now broadcast – with no restrictions or control – RT and allow [RT] free access to their countries,” Rubin said, arguing that its presence has “had a deleterious effect on the views of the rest of the world about a war that should be an open and shut case.”

Reacting to the new restrictions, Simonyan argued that Washington’s claims about RT collaborating with Russian intelligence are a “classic case of projection.” 

“The idea that you can’t achieve results without being part of the intelligence service has exposed them for what they are,” she said.