Independent journalists see this as an indelible smear. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists it is not intended to muzzle or censor — but to merely inform readers and viewers that some of the media they’re consuming has foreign funding.
“This law does not ban anyone from having one’s own opinion on an issue. It is about receiving financial aid from abroad during domestic political activities,” Putin said recently.
“While in the 1990s and in the early 2000s journalists were killed by hired assassins, as it happened with our journalist Anna Politkovskaya, for example — now it is a policy…
