Russia said on Thursday (5) it would take retaliatory measures against the United States in response to accusations against Russian media executives and state broadcaster RT, which Washington says are trying to influence the 2024 presidential election.
The United States on Wednesday (4) filed money laundering charges against two RT employees over what authorities said was a scheme to hire a U.S. company to produce online content to influence the 2024 election.
The U.S. Treasury and State departments also announced actions targeting RT, including the network’s top editor, Margarita Simonyan. U.S. officials said Russia’s goal was to exacerbate political divisions in the United States and undermine public support for American aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the measures were part of a plan to eliminate any dissenting voices from the global media landscape and to stoke fears among American voters about Russia as a mythical external enemy.
“When authorities resort to such primitive ways of influencing their voters, this is the decline of ‘liberal democracies,’” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
“There will be an answer,” Zakharova said.
“We warn that attempts to expel Russian journalists from the territory of the United States, to create unacceptable conditions for their work or any other forms of obstruction of their activities, including with the use of visa instruments, will become the basis for symmetric and/or asymmetric retaliatory measures against the American media.”
France-based Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 162nd out of 180 countries in terms of monitoring press freedom and ranked the United States 55th. Norway ranked first and Eritrea last.
Since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has tightened its control over information and media, forcing the closure of the last significant independent media outlets and designating many journalists and activists as “foreign agents.”
Many Western news organizations have left Moscow, and the arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich in 2023 has prompted many more journalists to leave. There are now almost no U.S. reporters in Russia.
Electoral interference
Russian officials say Western media groups provide soft coverage of Ukraine, biased coverage of the war and overly negative coverage of Russia. Western media groups say they try to provide balanced coverage.
RT responded with irony to the US allegations.
“Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the U.S. election,” the outlet told Reuters. RT stopped operating in the United States after major television distributors dropped it following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Simonyan said the accusations were an attempt to drown out RT as a competitor.
The Kremlin in June dismissed as absurd claims by U.S. intelligence that Russia was trying to interfere in the presidential election and said spies had tried to portray Russia as an enemy.
Previous assessments have found that Moscow tried to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Russian officials have suggested that the United States has also meddled in its internal affairs.
Russian lawmaker Maria Butina, who spent 15 months in jail in the US for acting as an unregistered Russian agent and now represents the ruling United Russia party, said the US claims were absurd.
“Russia thinks it doesn’t matter who wins the U.S. election – the only winner is the U.S. private military-industrial complex. That’s what matters – and nothing else,” Butina told Reuters.
This content was originally published in Russia promises to retaliate against US allegations of electoral interference on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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