On 7 October 2022, a court in the Russian city of Pskov fined local journalist Denis Kamalyagin 35,000 rubles for allegedly “discrediting” the Russian army. Kamalyagin, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Pskovskaya Guberniya, a regional independent news portal, said the court did not mention what publications he had been fined for. However, he suspected the sentence was linked to recents posts in his Telegram channel.
Kamalyagin was designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian Justice Ministry in December 2021, and was among the first Russian citizens to receive this status. He and other Pskovskaya Guberniya journalists left Russia in March 2022 after police searched the online media’s offices as part of an investigation into alleged support of anti-war protests. In June, Kalyagin was fined 10,000 rubles for not informing of his “foreign agent” status in his Telegram channel.