Security officials came to the editor-in-chief of The Insider announced as the foreign agent

The reasons for what is happening have not yet been reported. As the Mediazona underlines, the lawyer "Advocacy of Otkrytka" Oksana Oparenko left to visit Dobrokhotov.

“Human rights activists note that the connection with Dobrokhotov“ disappeared almost immediately”. A colleague of the editor-in-chief Sergey Yezhov tweeted that today Dobrokhotov was supposed to fly out of Russia”, - the message says.

According to The Insider* journalists, the formal reason for the search may be a libel case (Article 128.1 of the Criminal Code), initiated in April this year at the request of the Dutch blogger Maximilian Bernardus Wilem Van der Werff. The article was titled “Speaks and shows the GRU. How the Ministry of Defense Spreads Fakes through Foreign Journalists”. It said that Wilem Van der Werff collaborated with the GRU and received money from the Ministry of Defense for disseminating information about the Malaysian Boeing, which was flying MH17, shot down over Donbas.

The plane crash involving a Malaysian Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur took place on July 17, 2014 in the skies over Ukraine. As a result of the plane crash, none of the 298 passengers and crew members survived. Most of those killed were Dutch citizens. The investigation believes that the civilian airliner was shot down from the Russian Buk missile system belonging to the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade stationed in Kursk. In Russia, these accusations are denied. Among the suspects in the case are Russians Igor Girkin (Strelkov), Oleg Pulatov, Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.

According to The Insider*, the relatives of the journalist are being searched, but their names have not been disclosed.

The announcement of the inclusion of The Insider* in the register of "foreign agents" appeared on 23 July. After the announcement of the decision of the Ministry of Justice, Dobrokhotov said that The Insider "will continue its work," since The Insider is a Latvian publication that is registered in Latvia under Latvian law.

“And The Insider is not interested in what the Ministry of Justice wants there. The newspaper has no representative office in Russia, so all these crazy laws do not apply to Insider, Insider will work as he did”, - Dobrokhotov noted.

One of the most high-profile investigations of The Insider, together with CNN, Bellingcat and Der Spiegel, was an article about the alleged poisoners of politician Alexei Navalny, “Novichok”. This investigation came out in December 2020. In it, the publications named the names of eight FSB officers who monitored Alexei Navalny for three years and followed him throughout Russia. Some of these FSB officers have chemical and medical education. The publication about Navalny was followed by a series of other materials concerning the poisoning of other well-known public and political figures in the Russian Federation - Dmitry Bykov , Vladimir Kara-Murza and others. In contrast to the case of libel against the alleged spokesman for the GRU in Holland, the investigative authorities in the Russian Federation refused to investigate the facts of attempts on the life of Russian politicians.

This May list Media Foreign Agents, established in 2017, consisted of 20 lines. It included 15 media outlets and five individuals - mostly investigative journalists.

For the entire 2017, nine participants were added to the register. In 2019 - one more. There were seven inclusions in 2020. And in 2021, 17 "foreign agents" entered it at once. Some of them - for example, "Meduza" * - were included in the register on the denunciation of Alexander Ionov, a former member of the Public Monitoring Commission (POC) of Moscow. Now he demands to put the stigma of "foreign agent" on the publications of Novaya Gazeta and Vostochnye Stories.

* By the decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, the publication was included in the register of foreign media agents.