EU slaps sanctions on Russian social media
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The EU unveiled new sanctions on July 13 targeting Russia's largest social media company, VKontakte, as well as Max, the new social media app heavily promoted by the Russian government.
The focus of the latest sanctions is "Russia's continued use of new technologies to restrict freedom of expression, access to information, and freedom of association," an EU press statement says.
The listings include the company VK, which owns the social media website VKontakte, its daughter company Communication Platform LLC, which developed Max, and the latter's head, Elena Bagudina.
"VK provides technical support for the repression of civil society and democratic opposition, including by assisting and facilitating such acts," the EU said, noting that VK provided the Russian government with data on users who criticized Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the EU's listings focus on the Max app, which "comes pre-installed on all mobile devices sold in Russia and includes extensive surveillance features, later used for repressive actions against users criticizing Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine or posting other content banned by authorities," reads the EU press release.
The full sanctions listings say that the app's development was supervised by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and that its release coincided with a crackdown on Russian citizens' access to other social media apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
The EU's sanctions listing of VK comes weeks after Apple removed VKontakte from its app store for the second time.
The CEO of VK, Vladimir Kiriyenko, has been under EU sanctions since March 2022.
After the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in March 2024, the EU created a new framework for sanctions against Russia to allow the bloc to target those responsible for harming human rights, civil society, democracy, and the rule of law within Russia itself.
It was under this framework that the latest listings appear.
The EU has also included, in the same sanctions package, listings of companies involved in providing hardware and software used to carry out surveillance of digital communications in Russia.
