A Russian Senate commission says a dozen foreign media outlets meddled in Putin's re-election

The Russian Federation Council’s Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Foreign Interference has identified 12 foreign media outlets reporting in Russian that supposedly meddled in the March 18 presidential election.

According to Andrey Klimov, the commission’s chairman, the list includes several projects run through Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as RFI, Deutsche Welle, and The BBC. A full report with examples of the outlets’ supposed political interference (“biased reporting,” “incitements to boycott the vote,” and so on) will be published after Vladimir Putin’s next inauguration on May 7. In remarks to the magazine RBC, Klimov also criticized the Carnegie Moscow Center, highlighting its “suspicious” funding and allegedly jaded election coverage.

In March 2018, this commission released a report accusing the U.S. of meddling in foreign countries. Its sources were a Stalinist pseudo-historian, Wikipedia, and an American postgraduate student. You can read all about the ridiculousness in this special report by Meduza.

When the United States forced RT to register under FARA last year, the wrath of the Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Foreign Interference helped push lawmakers to authorize the federal government to designate media outlets as “foreign agents.”