Russia blocks WELT homepage
Russia blocks WELT homepage
The WELT website is now blocked in Russia. This was reported unanimously by several Russian news agencies. The federal service Roskomnadzor included Welt.de and all subdomains in the list of publications to be blocked.
welt.de is now blocked in Russia. The official justification of the censorship board is vague. But the critical coverage of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine is probably a thorn in the side of the Kremlin.
DThe WELT website is now blocked in Russia. This was reported unanimously by several Russian news agencies. The Federal Service for Supervision in the Field of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, better known as Roskomnadzor, included Welt.de and all subdomains in the list of publications to be blocked. Gradually, Russian providers implemented the demand.
At the end of March, Russia blocked the website of bild.de, which, like WELT, is published by Axel-Springer-Verlag. Previously, the websites of Deutsche Welle and the British BBC had landed on the list.
Welt.de can already be found in the publicly accessible database of blocked websites operated by Roskomnadzor. Accordingly, the WELT website was blocked after a request from the public prosecutor on July 9, 2022.
The reason for this remains vague: information that violates the law is being disseminated on welt.de, so the listing in Federal Law No. 149-FZ Article 15.3 is intended. The information is not mentioned. According to the Russian news agency Tass, it is about “calls for mass unrest, extremism and participation in illegal mass actions”.
So far, only the blocking of welt.de has been found under the file number of the public prosecutor named by Roskomnadzor 27-31-2022/Id9701-22. Numerous websites in connection with the de facto war censorship prevailing in Russia were blocked under similar file numbers in the series 27-31-2022. This includes, for example, posts in actually politically neutral Internet forums and social media that report on and criticize the war beyond the guidelines of state propaganda.
This suggests that welt.de’s suspension may have something to do with its coverage of Russia’s war against Ukraine. However, foreign-language sites rarely arouse the interest of the Russian censorship authorities. Most recently, however, the British “Daily Telegraph” landed on the blocked list in June.
Since bild.de was blocked in Russia, welt.de has published Russian translations of BILD articles reporting on the Russian war in Ukraine. It is very likely that it was precisely these posts that aroused the ire of the Russian censorship authorities – from the Kremlin’s point of view, offensive texts in Russian, hidden under German-language content.