Kremlin censors have long clashed with Meta-owned Facebook, largely because of its widespread acceptance by Russians as a rare social media platform free enough to hold honest public conversations. Many battles pitted Meta against Moscow — over relocation to Russia of servers holding Russian citizens’ data, over access to Russian security services, and of course, over direct censorship (removal of posts and blocking accounts).
It’s a familiar playbook. Turkey, Brazil, and other democracies harass Meta, Google, and other tech companies’ employees and demand an easy path to impose local censorship. What’s different this time is that Russia is threatening a US employee’s safety.
The Kremlin’s initial objective was to force Meta to set up a Russian hotline to remove undesirable content. Yandex, the Russian version of Google, was pressed to establish a hotline as early as 2009. But Facebook refused. The California-based company sent a stream of high-level representatives to Moscow in an effort to show it took the Kremlin seriously. Meanwhile, nothing much changed.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine ratcheted up the campaign. In March 2022, the Kremlin outlawed and blocked Facebook and Instagram — accusing the social media platforms of “conducting extremist activities.” A month later the Foreign Ministry published a stop list of 29 US citizens. Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was included.
The move was seen as symbolic, an attempt to imitate American and European sanctions against Russian officials: the list contained a motley collection of names, from George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and David Ignatius of the Washington Post to US Vice President Kamala Harris.
But the targeting of Andy Stone is more sinister.
The 29-name stop list sent a message that “we don’t want these people on our soil.” The wanted list is designed to intimidate and harass. This is a statement born from personal experience — one of this article’s authors has been on the Russian wanted list.
In Russia, a place on the wanted list ensures Russian surveillance — offline and online. His or her communications become the legitimate target of Russia’s so-called lawful interception system, known as SORM. In addition to communications, these measures (called ORM – operative-research measures) include tracking the target’s travels.
The scope is not limited to trips within Russia — Russian agencies, despite the war, still have the ability to track flights abroad. When two exiled journalists prepared to visit Sweden to attend a journalism conference, Russian security services emailed them details of their flight and hotel reservations.
The intimidation of US tech officials is not a new phenomenon. The Kremlin started spying on internet giants’ employees long ago. In June 2014, Marina Zhunich, Google’s chief Russian lobbyist, was put under surveillance by a private security service. When one of the authors asked her about this attempt to spy on her, Zhunich would not respond. She was right to be afraid — the businessman behind the surveillance operation was none other than the Wagner mercenary leader and violent criminal, Evgeny Prigozhin.
Other countries, including democracies, engage in heavy-handed tactics. Turkey has passed an internet law that allows the telecommunications regulator to block websites without a court order. Ankara frequently has imposed bans on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. In 2016, Brazilian police arrested Diego Dzodan, the São Paulo-based Facebook vice president for Latin America, because of his refusal to hand over WhatsApp data. The Facebook executive spent 24 hours in a Brazilian jail.
But there is something new in Russia’s behavior: a tech leader on a wanted list may well be abducted by the Russian security services. This fall, Kyrgyzstan detained Russian left-wing activist and anarchist Lev Skoryakin who was waiting in Kyrgyzstan for a political asylum decision from the German authorities.
In early November, Skoryakin was discovered in a Moscow detention center. His supposed crime was joining a 2021 protest outside a Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Moscow. He was charged with “hooliganism,” a much less serious accusation than the extremism and abetting terrorism charges against Andy Stone.
Any lingering illusion that this sort of danger concerns only Russian citizens vanished when two American journalists — Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, and Alsu Kurmasheva, of Radio Liberty/Free Europe — were thrown into Russian jails, where they remain.
Andy Stone needs to think very carefully about traveling outside the US. Some countries still accept Russian requests for extradition.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Nonresident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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