The administrative fine was issued to the Wikimedia Foundation by Timur Vakhrameev, a magistrate in judicial district 422 in Moscow’s Tagansky district, according to reports disseminated by Interfax. The decision was handed down after a formal proceeding that evaluated the foundation’s handling of information on the site.
The court stated that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. was penalized with an administrative fine of three million rubles for failing to remove certain information that qualified for deletion under applicable rules, specifically articles about Russian special operations that reportedly occurred in the Kharkiv region within Ukraine. The ruling underscored that these materials remained accessible on the platform, thereby violating the deletion requirements that had been in effect.
In a broad context, this marks Wikimedia’s eighth administrative penalty in 2023 related to content that authorities argued should have been removed. The court record indicates that the violation centered on content that authorities said should not have remained online, despite prior warnings or enforcement actions.
Wikimedia’s legal representative urged the court to conclude the proceedings, arguing that there were no concrete elements of a crime and that procedural errors had occurred during the trial. The defense contended that the case did not meet the threshold for criminal liability and that due process protections had not been adequately observed.
Earlier, Roskomnadzor had identified material under declaration 147 that had not been taken down from Wikipedia. The agency asserted that certain posts allegedly promoting suicide, extremism, terrorism, and dangerous behavior, as well as misinformation regarding the conduct of the special military operation in Ukraine and content discrediting the Russian Armed Forces, remained available on the site. The regulator emphasized that these materials had not been removed despite formal notices and enforcement expectations. This sequence reflects ongoing friction between global information platforms and state censorship regimes, a dynamic that has drawn attention from policymakers and digital rights observers across North America and beyond. [Source: Interfax]