Press Release, 14.06.2022

Photo: “Ban yourself!” / Photo by Emin Jafarov, Kommersant

From the beginning of the so-called “special military operation”, members of the Yabloko party, who had previously been under the scrutiny of the authorities and law enforcement agencies, were subjected to tremendous pressure. Dozens of activists were detained and arrested, homes of seventeen people were searched, nineteen protocols were drawn up against Yabloko members on “discrediting the army”. However, the Public Prosecutor General’s Office and Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications) came up with another way to interfere with the work of Yabloko: in less than three months, personal pages on social networks of five Yabloko politicians and the web-site of one regional branch were blocked. Blocking took place in the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, as well as on the Yandex.Zen platform.

Emilia Slabunova, MP of the Legislative Assembly of Karelia, was the first to report blocking of her personal page on VKontakte on 27 March, Roskomnadzor closed access to her page for users without any explanation.

Lev Shlosberg, the leader of the Pskov Yabloko, was the second to be banned on social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. On 28 March his personal web-site was blocked, and on 11 April his accounts on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki were blocked. Later, VKontakte closed the page of Lev Shlosberg’s wife Zhanna Shlosberg.

On 22 May, the VKontakte page of  Anna Cherepanova, Yabloko MP in the Novgorod City Duma, was blocked.

On 2 June, VKontakte closed access to the page of Boris Vishnevsky, MP of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg from Yabloko and Deputy Chairman of Yabloko.

On 8 June, the Yandex.Zen platform blocked the channel of Alexander Kudelkin, a Yabloko candidate for the State Duma in Yekaterinburg.

On 10 June, the provider blocked access to the website of the Altai regional branch of Yabloko.

In all the cases of blocking access to the pages of Yabloko politicians, Roskomnadzor referred to the request for of the Public Prosecutor General’s Office. Support services of social networks and providers send typical letters to the people whose accounts were blocked: your page was blocked by Roskomnadzor on a decision by the Public Prosecutor General’s Office. The reasons for blocking are as follows: the page either “posted information containing unreliable socially significant information about the course of the special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine” or “inaccurate socially significant information aimed at destabilising the socio-political situation in the Russian Federation”, however no details or explanations are provided.

The owners of the blocked resources did not receive the decision of the supervisory authority, none of the politicians knows what materials the Public Prosecutor General’s Office considered unreliable. At the same time, the support services promised some Yabloko politicians to unlock the resources if they remove the materials with “incorrect information”.

Trying to figure out what was happening, Emilia Slabunova, Lev Shlosberg, Anna Cherepanova and Boris Vishnevsky sent inquiries to the supervisory and regulatory authorities. However, the answers did not provide any reasons for blocking.

It has become known that law enforcement agencies got denunciations about the website of the Yabloko party. In particular, in Saratov they are asking to block the main information resource of the party, because it was collecting signatures under a petition for peace with Ukraine.

It is obvious for Yabloko that the decision to block Yabloko information resources is purely political. One just should want peace, in order to be blocked in Russia today.