A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced the parent company of the online participatory encyclopedia Wikipedia to a fine of two million rubles for two articles on the offensive against Ukraine, deemed untrue in Moscow.
According to Russian news agencies, the Wikimedia Foundation will have to pay a penalty of two million rubles (about 40,000 Canadian dollars) for not having removed these articles which, according to the court, contained “false information”.
The head of the Wikimedia RU association, which supports the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation in Russia, confirmed that this condemnation related to “two articles related to the events in Ukraine”.
“No one will delete” the two pages in question and the court’s decision “will be challenged in court”, Vladimir Medeïko told AFP.
The fine imposed on the online encyclopedia illustrates the repression of the Russian authorities against the entities and people they accuse of publishing “false information” on the military intervention in Ukraine.
This is the third fine that the Wikimedia Foundation has been ordered to pay in Russia since the start of this conflict.
The main foreign social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, were blocked and the American digital giant Google was fined 360 million euros in July for not having removed content criticizing the offensive in Ukraine published on YouTube.
The Internet is one of the last spaces for free expression in Russia, but the authorities have stepped up the pressure in recent years, and even more so since the start of the intervention in Ukraine.
In 2015, Moscow briefly put Wikipedia on the list of sites to be blocked because of an article about Charas, a strain of cannabis. Russian law prohibits any online publication about the use of narcotics.
In 2019, President Vladimir Putin called for the creation of a Russian alternative to Wikipedia.