Russian Attorney General blocks the country’s most prominent Russian nationalist website

Russia’s Attorney General has ordered the federal censor to begin blocking the Russian nationalist website Sputnik & Pogrom, arguing that the political blog “propagates ethnic and religious hatred, forming a public security threat and inciting extremism.”

The website started out as a community on Vkontakte by the same name, created by Egor Prosvirnin in 2012. In 2014, Sputnik & Pogrom became known for openly crowdfunding an armored personnel carrier for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Prosvirnin says he plans to move the website to a new domain and possibly rename it Putin & Medvedev or Attorney General (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, & Russia).

According to data from SimilarWeb, Sputnik & Pogrom had 1.4 million visits in June 2017 alone.