Independent TV Rain declared 'undesirable' in Russia, losing source of funds

(Reuters) - The liberal-leaning independent Russian TV station Dozhd (TV Rain), already driven abroad to try to evade censorship, said on Tuesday that it had been banned in Russia as an "undesirable organisation".

The prosecutor-general's move against Dozhd's subsidiaries in Latvia and the Netherlands will have little effect on its ability to be seen in Russia, where most people can only access its programmes on YouTube. However, it means anyone supporting Dozhd from Russia could now be committing an offence.

"We've been called 'undesirable in Russia', but we're not: 13 million viewers in Russia in the last month confirm that," Dozhd said in a post on the Telegram messaging service.

"But the safety of our viewers is the most important thing for us. That is why we're stopping the collection of donations from Russia, cancelling existing subscriptions from Russians and urging you not to share links to our materials if you live in the Russian Federation - this is now unsafe."

Dozhd, portrayed in the 2021 film "Tango with Putin", was visited and praised in 2011 by then-president Dmitry Medvedev when it was just a year old, and largely apolitical.

But like other Russian independent media, it has come under pressure since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012.

In 2014, it was thrown off broadcast networks, and in 2021 it was expelled from the Kremlin press pool and labelled a "foreign agent", which burdened it with bureaucratic requirements and forced it to append a disclaimer to its output.

In March last year, Russia's communications watchdog announced it was blocking Dozhd's output, accusing it of spreading "deliberately false information about the actions of Russian military personnel" who had marched into Ukraine a few days before. The next day, Dozhd announced that its team had left Russia.

Since then it has broadcast from Latvia and the Netherlands and streamed on YouTube, which is not censored in Russia.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Sharon Singleton)