On June 4, 2026, Russia's Deputy Justice Minister Oleg Sviridenko told a Federation Council commission on state sovereignty something his ministry rarely says out loud: the country's flagship "foreign agent" law has almost nothing to do with foreign money. If receiving foreign funding were still the test, he explained, it "would cover just 4% of foreign agents." He went further, dismissing the original rationale entirely: "money isn't even needed anymore — there are other forms now" (Meduza).
It is an unusually candid admission. For a decade the Kremlin defended the foreign-agent register as a transparency measure — a way to tell Russians when information reaching them was paid for from abroad. Sviridenko has now conceded that 96% of the people and groups added in 2025 fail that test. The label survives anyway, resting almost entirely on a vaguer trigger.
The 2022 pivot from money to 'influence'
The mechanism that severed the law from foreign funding is Federal Law No. 255-FZ, signed July 14, 2022, "On control over the activities of persons under foreign influence." Its Article 2 defines foreign influence as the "provision by a foreign source of support and (or) rendering impact on a person, including by coercion, belief and (or)" other means (Federal Law No. 255-FZ text). "Belief" — persuasion — is doing enormous work in that sentence. A Russian who reads foreign media, attends an overseas conference, or simply agrees with a position the state dislikes can be deemed "under foreign influence" without a ruble ever changing hands.
That is precisely how the register has grown. Data compiled by OVD-Info shows the Justice Ministry added 178 individuals and 37 organizations in 2025 — 215 designations, up roughly a third from 164 in 2024. Of those, 173 (about 80%) were listed specifically for opposing the war in Ukraine or supporting Ukraine. Journalists were the fastest-growing category, jumping from 35 designations in 2024 to 90 in 2025 (OVD-Info, Repression in Russia in 2025). The register now runs to well over a thousand entities since the unified list launched in December 2022.
Why the distinction matters for the open internet
The consequences are not symbolic. Under the foreign-agent regime, designees must attach a lengthy disclaimer to every public communication — for audiovisual content, a label covering at least 20% of the screen for at least 15 seconds — file activity reports every six months, and accept bans on teaching, holding public office, producing content for minors, and receiving any state funds. Non-compliance carries heavy administrative fines and, for organizations, liquidation; RFE/RL alone was hit with roughly ₽70 million ($950,000) in penalties (Wikipedia: Russian foreign agent law). For an independent journalist or a small outlet, those obligations are designed to make ordinary publishing — on a website, a YouTube channel, a Telegram feed — legally radioactive.
This is the platform-regulation dimension that often gets lost. The foreign-agent label is, functionally, a content-labeling and distribution mandate imposed on speech the state cannot otherwise ban. It turns every post into a compliance hazard and pushes hosting platforms to demote, geo-block, or remove labeled accounts to limit their own exposure. The chilling effect is the point.
Steelmanning the regulator
There is a legitimate version of this concern, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Democracies do worry about covert foreign-funded influence. The United States' Foreign Agents Registration Act and the EU's emerging foreign-influence transparency rules exist because voters arguably have a right to know when political messaging is bankrolled by a foreign government. Disclosure — who paid for this — can be a proportionate, speech-preserving tool. A narrowly drawn law that compelled genuine funding transparency, with judicial review and a real evidentiary threshold, would be defensible.
That is exactly the standard Russia's own deputy minister just admitted his system fails. A transparency law that applies to funding in only 4% of cases is not a transparency law; it is a registry of dissent wearing a transparency law's clothes. The remaining 96% are being labeled for what they think and say, not for any money trail a reader could meaningfully weigh.
The lesson for everyone else
The broader warning is about statutory design, and it travels. Georgia passed a "transparency of foreign influence" law in 2024 modeled closely on Russia's framework; similar bills have surfaced from Central Asia to the Sahel. Each is sold on the FARA analogy. Russia's experience shows where the analogy breaks: once a statute defines the trigger as "influence" or "persuasion" rather than a documented, auditable financial transaction, the funding rationale becomes optional — and then, as Sviridenko put it, unnecessary.
For an open internet that depends on independent reporting and dissenting speech crossing borders freely, that drift is the whole danger. Good-faith transparency regulation asks a narrow, factual question: who funded this message? Russia's law has stopped asking. By the ministry's own arithmetic, it now asks a different question entirely — whose side are you on? — and punishes the wrong answer. The 4% figure is not a footnote. It is the clearest evidence yet that the foreign-agent system has abandoned the only justification that ever made it legitimate.