BBC News has just added TOR mirror sites with news in both Ukrainian and Russian.

The addresses are:

• BBC News in Russian https://www.bbcweb3hytmzhn5d532owbu6oqadra5z3ar726vq5kgwwn6aucdccrad.onion/russian
• BBC News in Ukrainian https://www.bbcweb3hytmzhn5d532owbu6oqadra5z3ar726vq5kgwwn6aucdccrad.onion/ukrainian

These type of link require the TOR browser: https://www.torproject.org/download/

On the BBC – opinion

I’ve laughably been told in the past that RT (Russia Today) is more impartial than the BBC.

While the BBC does has biases there are people on the left who accuse it of right wing bias (Nigel Farage’s 35 appearances on Question Time anyone?) and people on the right who accuse it of being too woke and lefty (yep, it’s run by people who work in TV Media).

When the left think you’re too right wing and the right think you’re too left wing then you’re probably in about the right place on the political spectrum. We can argue all day about BBC content across its channels but News is on the money. Ros Akins’s explainer videos are incredibly objective and informative.

But Russia is a country without freedom of speech and an increasingly oppressive regime fighting the information war through real censorship, not the imaginary type that people whinge about in Britain. We can openly criticise the government without fear of arrest.

I have looked at RT intermittently throughout the Ukraine invasion and it’s obviously full of spin and lies.

Some facts:

• Russia has blocked the BBC website, via Reuters
• Russian liberal TV news channel Дождь / TVRain was ordered to shut operations by the authorities, via Indian Express
• Russia is blocking (or at least seriously throttling, to make it unusable) Twitter, via netblocks

They are afraid that the truth will threaten the Russian leadership. A leadership that murders dissidents with Polonium and Novichok.

There’s no doubt who’s on the wrong side of history here.

The world should get behind flooding the web with free and open information about what they are really doing so it becomes impossible to keep the truth out. And this must extend beyond channels easily blocked by the Russian government. All credit due to the BBC for making News available on the dark web.