Sanctions won’t make the Russian broadcaster go away, read a message projected onto the building
The facade of the US embassy in Moscow was lit up with a defiant message from RT on Thursday evening, as the Russian broadcaster informed the Americans that it is “not going away.”
The projected message reads “we’re not going away” in both English and Russian, with RT’s logo displayed underneath.
The diplomatic prank came after the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on RT and its parent companies earlier this month, accusing the network of being “engaged in covert influence activities… and functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.” The US Justice Department also filed criminal charges against two people it claimed worked for RT, accusing them of financing video content that sowed “discord and division” in the US.
In the weeks since the sanctions were announced, RT’s accounts were banned by Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – and TikTok.
“Tonight, as part of RT’s response, the bright green RT logo is lighting up the façade of the US Embassy building in Moscow, with a message: ‘We’re not going away’. Not in the US, not in the West at large, not in the rest of the world,” RT’s press office said in a statement on Thursday.
“We will keep doing our jobs,” the press office added, concluding: “see you around.”
RT is being targeted by Western nations “because they are fighting Russia,” RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan told newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda earlier this week. “And Russia has a stable position in the international information space. And it is improving despite all their counteractions.”
“We find ways to bypass these sanctions. This is sort of a game of cat and mouse. And it will continue,” Simonyan added.
Simonyan, who posted videos and pictures of the embassy stunt to her Telegram channel on Thursday, has long had a reputation in the West as an “expert troller,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour proclaimed earlier this month.
While announcing the sanctions earlier this month, US State Department official Jamie Rubin – Amanpour’s ex-husband – blamed RT for the fact that “so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine [during the conflict with Russia] as you would think they would be.”
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