The remaining editors at the independent news company RBC will be required to get prior approval from the organization's general director, Nikolai Molibog, for all news stories, according to Meduza's sources. Staff at RBC's politics desk say they're prepared to keep working “until the first story is taken down.”
On Friday, May 13, RBC dismissed its three top editors, Maxim Soluys, Roman Badanin, and Elizaveta Osetinskaya.
According to the news agency Reuters, the firings are the result of pressure from the Kremlin, for whom the final straw was RBC's decision to publish a story about oyster farming that's set to start near a palatial property in southern Russia dubbed “Putin's Palace.”