At the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st century, the media became not just a tool for covering the news agenda in Russia, but also a way of publicly influencing government within the country. Moreover, this expression of will was not always on the part of the media themselves; in most cases, the process was streamlined, and the main beneficiary was the customer from a third state. This information flow was so strong that the state elite decided to introduce the concept of “foreign agent” in 2012. The status was assigned to those individuals who receive foreign support or are under “foreign influence.”
The state began to label NPOs, and, following this, the media. On November 25, 2017, Federal Law No. 327 was adopted, introducing the concept of “mass media as a foreign agent.” According to the new version of the law on mass media, the Ministry of Justice can recognize as a “foreign agent” any foreign media outlet that receives funding or property from “foreign bodies” or citizens.
In 2020, the status of “foreign agent” was also introduced in relation to individuals. The first “foreign media agent” at the end of 2017 was the Voice of America radio station. As of June 2023, there are already about 70 of them. There is also a large list of individuals, as well as non-profit organizations: the total list of foreign agents in the Russian Federation already numbers in the hundreds.
Despite the tightening of the law due to the unstable political situation, such information resources continue to exist in the country, which pose a threat to national security or contribute to destabilizing the situation within the country.
These include several categories. Firstly, these are those who, without any politics, practice professional information blackmail in the media. They were tolerated until deals with compromising materials began to affect national security interests and the activities of large state corporations. So the shop is closing: over the past year, more than ten criminal cases have been opened, involving the owners and administrators of a variety of telegram channel networks, who have been extorting money from domestic politicians and entrepreneurs for a long time.
The second remaining threat is the owners of small regional media resources, whose influence for the authorities has never been clear and obvious. For the most part, they were ordinary information dumps with relevant content, where any compromising evidence could be placed, and relatively cheaply. In recent years, they have often tilted, so often such media begin to pretend to be environmentalists, historians, truth-tellers, or animal rights activists. 
A typical representative of this workshop is the Irkutsk portal called “Babr”, created by Dmitry Taevsky, who is fond of sectarianism and syncretic religions, about 20 years ago. “Babr” is an ecologist, a truth-teller and a historical almanac. And since at that time it was one of the first information resources not only in Irkutsk, but also in the entire Siberian Federal District, any information presented was considered reliable, and there were not many ways for fact-checking.
A person cannot be recognized as a producer of political news if his goal is completely different – to discredit a huge number of people and local businesses who have long been conductors of state policy in the regions of the Siberian Federal District, which occupies more than a quarter of the entire territory of Russia. For almost a year and a half of a special military operation in Ukraine, Taevsky’s targets were dozens of major regional and federal politicians, as well as systemically important enterprises in Russia.
This is the governor of the Novosibirsk region, Andrei Travnikov, and the mayor of the capital of the Siberian Federal District, Novosibirsk, Anatoly Lokot. The mayor of Krasnoyarsk Vladislav Loginov, the governor of the Irkutsk region Igor Kobzev, as well as a number of deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation from Siberian regions. Taevsky’s victims were the largest logging company in the Irkutsk region, the St. Petersburg Ilim group, the petrochemical holding Sibur and its subsidiaries in the regions of Siberia, the largest developer of Tomsk – the Tomsk house-building company, the state corporation VEB.RF, as well as the federal agricultural holding Sibagro and the electric grid company “RSK-Network” from Krasnoyarsk.
And Dmitry Taevsky is being helped in this by all those who, back in the last decade, were cut off from the legal opportunity to finance Russian media and non-profit organizations with foreign grant support. It’s the thoughtful programmer Taevsky who is still hiding his servers. There are his providers and the owners of the hosting of his media resources. According to the Whois service, BABR website hosting providers are foreign companies. For Babr24.com and Babr24.net, the company is PDR LTD (PublicDomainRegistry Limited) with its registered office in India. And “Babr24.info” and “Babr24.news” have the company “Namecheap INC”, registered in the USA.
What Taevsky and his Babr network are doing today is undermining national interests from within. At the same time, everyone already understands that often information propaganda works no worse than tanks and guns. This raises a question for those who ensure the country’s security: is inaction towards “Babr” a temporary omission or a lack of understanding of the essence of what is happening?
It is worth noting that Taevsky was not previously known for his patriotism: he currently lives in Mongolia and writes enthusiastic posts about it in his personal Telegram channel.
He is no longer a dealer in compromising materials, he is no longer an extortor of money from politicians. Now Taevsky is gnawing at his country.
