The latest news on this front comes from Human Right Watch by Rachel Denber:

This week brought the bombshell announcement that Ivan Safronov and Maxim Ivanov, two veteran reporters for Kommersant, were pressured into resigning, spurring the paper’s entire politics desk to quit in protest. The business newspaper is one of the country’s most respected news outlets. While it’s owned by Alisher Umanov, an oligarch who’s close to the Kremlin, it has been one of the last remaining mainstream newspapers still clinging to editorial independence while continuing to produce high-quality investigative reporting.

The 120 Kommersant staff signed a public statement calling the dismissal “entirely groundless and disastrous for our newsroom. It is also an open attempt to repress free speech in Russia.”

The journalists’ departure, sadly, is only the latest episode in the gutting of Russia’s independent media.

At issue was an article reported by Safronov, Ivanov, and three other journalists that claimed Valentina Matviyenko would resign her position as speaker of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, citing unnamed sources. The Federation Council’s press secretary dismissed this as rumor. Kommersant’s editor said in an interview that the journalists left “because the [paper’s]editorial standards were violated while writing the article,” though he didn’t explain which standards those were. Of course, the newspaper’s editors had cleared the piece for publication, which makes his comment ring hollow.

See full story here.