Russia on June 25 announced a ban on access to 81 different media outlets from 25 European Union countries, saying the action is in retaliation for an EU ban announced in May on several Russian media outlets.
The EU ban stripped the broadcasting rights in the bloc of what it described as four "Kremlin-linked propaganda networks," naming them as the Voice of Europe, the RIA Novosti news agency, Izvestia, and Rossiiskaya gazeta.
Among the 81 news outlets that the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was banning in retaliation are Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the leading print publications Der Spiegel and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany, Le Monde and Liberation in France, El Pais in Spain, and La Stampa and La Repubblica in Italy.
Austria's ORF state TV company, Ireland's RTE broadcaster, and Spain's EFE news agency were also among the outlets affected by the move.
The only EU countries with no media outlets on the banned list are Croatia and Luxembourg.
The ministry accused them of "systematically distributing inaccurate information" about what Russia calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
"The Russian Federation has repeatedly warned at various levels that politically motivated harassment of domestic journalists and unjustified bans on Russian media in the EU will not go unanswered," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"In spite of this, Brussels and the capitals of the bloc's countries preferred to follow the path of escalation, forcing Moscow to adopt mirror and proportional countermeasures."
It said it would review the ban if the EU lifted its restrictions on RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and the Rossiiskaya gazeta.
U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the move was another sign of the Russian government's crackdown on journalism.
"They're afraid of their own people hearing the truth; hearing the truth about Russia's actions inside Russia, the actions by the government to repress their own people, about Russian's actions to invade a neighbor, and illegally occupy its neighbor," he said.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma, said the EU's ban on the Russian news outlets had shown that the West refused to accept any alternative point of view.
The Austrian Foreign Ministry criticized Moscow's decision and summoned the charge d'affaires of the Russian Embassy in Vienna.
"This decision is another, albeit unsurprising, step by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to suppress media diversity and thus keep his own population in the dark," the ministry said.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, more than a million websites have been blocked in Russia, including Facebook, Instagram, and X, as well as independent media websites, including RFE/RL. To bypass blocking, Russians use VPN services, which the authorities also regularly block.