A threat to public safety. Two Russian news media editors fined for quoting a censorship official’s critique of “anime and Spider‑Men” notebooks

Alexandra Mikhaleva, a magistrate in Moscow’s Tagansky district, has fined the heads of two Russian outlets—one loyalist and one antiwar—30,000 roubles each, about $385, on the same day, under the same article of the Administrative Offences Code, over reports of the same speech in the State Duma.

Judge Mikhaleva of judicial district No. 374 issued both rulings on July 1. They share most of their wording.

One concerns Ksenia Shardt, owner of the Telegram channel of Daily Storm, a Russian loyalist publication; the other Sergei Ainbinder, editor-in-chief of RusNews, an outlet known for livestreaming protests, whose correspondent Maria Ponomarenko is serving six years over a post about the bombing of the Mariupol theatre. Both rulings are published on the Moscow magistrate courts’ website. Neither defendant appeared in court.

The remarks at issue were made by Andrey Tsyganov, who edits the self-described Orthodox-patriotic outlet Katyusha and who at the time chaired a commission on protecting children from “destructive content” attached to the Public Council at Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship agency. At a round table in the Duma he complained that Russian children were being raised on anime and Western characters, called for the promotion of domestic heroes across cinema, cartoons and the school curriculum, and said he wanted old Russian warriors and beauties on the covers of notebooks rather than anime, toy cars and Spider-Men.

Daily Storm reported this on February 24, under a headline placing the outrage with the the state media watchdog. The post described Tsyganov as chairman of the Roskomnadzor commission on protecting children from “destructive content”, which is what he was called at the time, and quoted him on the need for the state rather than commerce to settle the question.

Three days later, Roskomnadzor’s deputy head Vadim Subbotin rebuffed the report as false. Then, on March 2 the first deputy prosecutor general demanded that access to that Telegram post be restricted as material “aimed at destabilising socio-political situation”.

RusNews published their report on March 8. Its version of the story went further: the headline announced that Roskomnadzor had found a replacement for anime and Mickey Mouse, and that the replacement was participants in the Ukraine war. The post said, quoting Tsyganov, that the agency had described films, cartoons and school programmes as poisoned by the legacy of the 1990s and its foreign imagery, and had proposed substituting war veterans along with Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, two medieval princes canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Both rulings state, in identical language, that knowing falsity is a mandatory element of the offence under part 9 of article 13.15, that the information must be untrue and its untruth obvious to the person spreading it. Neither ruling then finds that either editor knew anything. What the court establishes instead is that each of them had the opportunity to check the information, and that each of them could have sent an official enquiry to Roskomnadzor to verify it and did not.

The threat to public order is handled the same way: false information concerning a federal executive body discredits its work, is capable of provoking a negative reaction and indignation, and thereby creating a threat to public safety.

Tsyganov, for his part, was removed from Roskomnadzor’s Public Council in May; Katyusha attributed his removal to his objections to the state-backed Max messenger and to the presidential administration’s Sergei Kiriyenko, rather than to anything he said about anime.