Since Dec. 2, Russians who post links to foreign media content can be branded “foreign agents” and systematically, and legally, harassed by the country’s fearsome bureaucracy and law-enforcement system. The law, quickly passed by parliament and signed by President Vladimir Putin, comes a little more than a month after Maria Butina, the gun advocate convicted in the U.S., returned to Moscow after spending 15 months in a U.S. prison for acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
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Leonid Bershidsky: Putin is seeing ‘foreign agents’ everywhere
A view of the Kremlin and Red Square in downtown Moscow on Aug. 7, 2019.
