EU Sanctions Journalist for Pro-Palestine Coverage

In May 2025, the EU Council announced its seventeenth package of sanctions, ostensibly aimed at targeting individuals who provide support to the Russian government. Among the list of various individuals with financial ties to the Russian Federation could be found the name of Hüseyin Doğru, a German-Turkish journalist and founder of the red.media outlet. Doğru was accused of collaborating with the Russian government in order to ‘undermine or threaten stability and security in the [EU]’ and of ‘disseminating the narratives of radical Islamic terrorist groups such as Hamas’. The only evidence the EU Council gave for these accusations was red.media’s coverage of pro-Palestine student occupations in Berlin.

These sanctions have had severe consequences for Doğru and his family. Doğru and his wife’s bank accounts were frozen and both are barred from working, leaving them to support themselves and their 3 young children on a €506 monthly stipend. Further, the German Bundestag passed legislation making it a jailable offense to provide any sort of material assistance such as food or money to sanctioned individuals like Doğru. This process took place entirely extrajudicially, being decided exclusively by the European Council. Normally EU citizens are entitled to a hearing and defence in court before being sanctioned, which Doğru as a German citizen should have been entitled to. However, the EU sanctions package intentionally listed him as only being a Turkish citizen to avoid this. Given that Doğru is cut off from any sort of funds, it is impossible for him to try pursue the matter in the European Court of Justice.

During its run red.media covered the Gaza Genocide, focusing in particular on the complicity of the German government and the EU. The outlet also frequently wrote positively about the construction of socialism in the German Democratic Republic as well as the systematic looting of the GDR economy after the victory of counterrevolution. As a result, the outlet was subjected to a widespread disinformation campaign against it, beginning with an article in the German outlet Die Tageszeitung falsely claiming that red.media was a continuation of the Russian-funded Redfish outlet. These accusations were echoed by other German outlets and even by then-US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. The accusations had absolutely no basis, with red.media explicitly characterising Russia as a major imperialist power and frequently criticising the inter-imperialist Russia-Ukraine conflict. Nevertheless Meta and Youtube both terminated red.media’s social media accounts following Blinken’s comments. Under the weight of this defamation campaign as well as EU repression, red.media was forced to shut down in May 2025.

While the EU attempts to portray itself as being a bastion of liberal, democratic values, the plight of Doğru clearly shows how the EU is more than happy to repress any form of dissent that it feels is too dangerous to be tolerated. These features of repression are not particular to countries like Russia as the EU pretends but are instead universal features of class rule. red.media’s solidarity with Palestine and recognition of the successes of socialism in the 20th century undercut the EU’s falsified version of history and were thus especially dangerous. We can further see from the coordinated media campaign against red.media that the media is not a neutral body, that it has a very definite class character and operates as an arm of EU policy, to the point of joining in a campaign of slander against fellow journalists.