Russian Duma Passes New Restrictions on ‘Foreign Agents’ Russia’s latest crackdown on “foreign agents” reads less like regulatory fine-tuning and more like a declaration that anyone under suspicion is fair game. The State Duma has rammed through fresh restrictions that tighten control, widen punishment, and shrink any remaining space for independent civic or media work.

What the law does

Both opposition-leaning outlets agree on the substance: the Duma has moved to “tighten rules for ‘foreign agents’ — adding more inspections and banning social advertising.” The new amendments:

• Ban social advertising on the platforms of “foreign agents” and forbid them from ordering such ads at all, where previously only commercial advertising was restricted.
• Force banks to hand over detailed information on the accounts, deposits, and transactions of designated individuals and organizations to the Justice Ministry within three days of a request.
• Strip “foreign agents” of protections against surprise inspections that still apply to ordinary businesses and NGOs, making checks easier and potentially more intrusive.
• Lock people and groups into the label for longer by limiting how quickly they can reapply to be removed from the registry.

How broad is the net?

Here, too, the picture is consistent across critical outlets. More than 1,200 individuals and organizations now carry the “foreign agent” brand, with 178 people and 37 organizations added in 2025 alone. Yet, by the deputy justice minister’s own numbers, only 4 percent of those labeled in 2025 actually received foreign funding.

The reason: since 2022, the law allows anyone to be designated purely for alleged “foreign influence,” even without a single foreign transfer. As Novaya Gazeta Europe drily notes, the Duma bill is officially framed as “strengthening state control” over these entities — a euphemism for turning an already political blacklist into a permanent instrument of pressure.

The bottom line

Both Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe, themselves targets of the system they’re describing, converge on the same conclusion: the Kremlin is less interested in transparency than in total leverage over anyone it chooses to brand an outsider.