MOSCOW, March 13. /TASS/. The West is pushing ahead with eliminating the last signs of Russia’s media presence, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel on Sunday.

"The countries constituting the collective West are pushing ahead with the elimination of the last signs of Russia’s information presence. It will be appropriate to describe the situation in some countries as mega-genocide of the Russian mass media," she said.

Zakharova said the Western countries’ authorities no longer bothered to offer legal excuses for the persecution of Russian journalists, and the biggest American IT companies had joined the process. She recalled that the Western attempts to impede the operation of mass media from Russia had begun to be stepped up more than ten years ago and kept growing ever since.

"Pressure on Russian and, in some countries, on Russian-language mass media by ‘advanced’ democracies grew noticeably after Georgia’s aggression against Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 and gained more strength after the government coup in Ukraine in 2014," she said.

Zakharova mentioned some outrageous examples, such as visa procrastinations a TASS correspondent in Britain experienced in 2019, which she slammed as "cynical bureaucratic humiliation."

"After more than 18 months of red-tape the journalist and his family were deported. They were escorted to the airport and given back their passports only after border crossing checks. Incidentally, later the British authorities refused to issue visas to two other journalists, whom the agency tried to send as substitutes for their expelled colleague," Zakharova concluded.