Anastasiia Vorozhtsova, freelance writer and editor at Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, discusses how “foreign agent” laws are silencing journalists in Russia
“THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED BY FOREIGN AGENT [FIRST NAME, PATRONYMIC, SURNAME], OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT [FIRST NAME, PATRONYMIC, SURNAME].”
For failing to include the above notice in four Telegram posts, journalist Sergey Smirnov is wanted in Russia. “I have a criminal case that’s a page and a half long! It’s so ridiculous,” Smirnov, the editor-in-chief of Mediazona, a leading Russian media outlet based in exile, told me in an earlier interview. He is among hundreds of journalists and media outlets deemed “foreign agents” by the Russian authorities.
Evoking the Soviet-era stigmas of “spies” and “enemies of the people,” Russia’s now-sprawling “foreign agent” legislation functions as a tool for casting individuals and organizations out of society. Journalists and media outlets are its primary targets. The label has proved so effective at silencing critique that other autocrats have proposed or adopted similar measures, turning the “Russian law” model into a staple of a rule that capitalizes on secrecy.
Introduced in 2012 in the aftermath of mass protests for free and fair elections, the law initially affected Russian NGOs: it obliged groups that engaged in “political activity” and received “foreign funding” to register as “foreign agents,” or face administrative and criminal penalties. Such organizations also had to mark all content they published, disclose their activities online, and submit extensive financial reports. The law’s veil of transparency did not fool many, and human rights experts condemned the measure as a backward step given the country’s totalitarian past.
Over the following years, the legislation has evolved to concern the media and individuals. Definitions expanded and obscured to include “foreign influence.” The list of restrictions lengthened. Fines and criminal sanctions grew heftier. In October 2024, in a case involving journalists and media outlets, the European Court of Human Rights held that Russia’s “foreign agent” legislation violates the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and privacy. The Court noted that the law, along with its arbitrary application, bore “the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime.”
To taint is far from the measures’ only goal. Another is to cripple. For example, “foreign agents” are now banned from using advertising and must have “special ruble accounts” for their royalties-and-assets income, accessible only after the beneficiary is no longer on the blacklist. “Those who betrayed our country will not enrich themselves at the expense of its citizens,” commented the speaker of the lower house of Parliament. This past October, the latest tightening came into force: criminal liability—up to two years in prison—now comes after a single administrative violation of the law.
Russia’s Ministry of Justice has long set up a routine: it picks new traitors every Friday. On November 28, among those just designated as “foreign agents” were a journalist and a news portal. (The latter, student-led media “DOXA,” was also branded an “undesirable organization” a year ago.) For all the newly labeled, the grounds for designation included “spreading false information” and “opposing the special military operation,” that is, opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
OVD-Info, one of the country’s most prominent human rights groups and—what were its odds?—a “foreign agent” itself, monitors political persecution in Russia. OVD-Info’s data shows that out of more than 1100 individuals and organizations on the “foreign agent” register, nearly 40% are journalists and media outlets. Other labels, like “undesirable organization,” help. This year, in 295 new designations of both types, the media stands out as the most affected sector, accounting for 117 cases.
Since autocratic regimes copy each other in going after journalists and civil society, “foreign agent” laws proliferate. The first European state to adopt Russia’s template was Hungary. Even though the European Court of Justice struck down the law’s initial 2017 version, Viktor Orbán’s government pushed another “foreign agent” bill in May 2025; if enacted, the law would empower the controversial Sovereignty Protection Office to blacklist those organizations it considers a threat to Hungary’s sovereignty.
When Georgia’s government tried to pass a “foreign agent” law in 2023, tens of thousands took to the streets, forcing the lawmakers to drop the bill quickly. Yet the ruling party brought an alternative a year later. Crowds of over 100,000 protested, with many holding posters saying, “NO TO RUSSIAN LAW.” Despite the rage of the people and international pressure, the Georgian parliament approved the law in May 2024; in March 2025, it passed a second “foreign agent” bill introducing criminal liability.
And so it goes on. Republika Srpska adopted a Russia-style “foreign agent” law in February 2025 (the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina then suspended it in May). Slovakia, forced to revise the initial Russian-copycat draft, adopted a version of the law in April 2025. Proposals of similar bills have emerged in Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Türkiye. Far beyond Europe, similar laws were passed in Nicaragua in 2020, Kyrgyzstan in 2024, and Zimbabwe, El Salvador, and Ecuador in 2025.
In his concurring opinion in Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia, another European Court of Human Rights case on freedom of expression, Judge Darian Pavli argued that Russia’s decline into autocracy required a “bird’s eye view.” He referred to the country’s “massive legal edifice of ‘rule by law’—of gradual suffocation through a thousand regulations devised and tightened over time to control every inch of Russian political space and much of the personal space of ordinary Russians.”
The “foreign agent” legislation is only one part of the edifice that Judge Pavli describes, yet it proved to be an essential piece. The law began to sap the country of independent journalism well before the Kremlin moved to violently destroy millions of lives. By February 24, 2022, Russia’s independent media was at its weakest. Swiftly, the suffocation intensified by outright bans on any reporting the authorities did not like.
Moscow-style “foreign agent” laws offer ground on which to build further lawfare. To those watching to replicate repression, Russia offers an elaborate blueprint of how to construct an entire legal architecture of control. To those seeking to resist, stopping “foreign agent” bills in their tracks becomes vital: blocking one prevents the cascade of harsher laws that will likely follow. The withdrawal of even one repressive bill can help preserve a democracy. Not always. But sometimes—crucially—it can.
Anastasiia Vorozhtsova is a freelance writer and editor at Columbia Global Freedom of Expression.