When Canada banned Russian state television network RT, analysts said it was only a matter of time before Moscow retaliated with Canadian news outlets in the crosshairs.
That the target was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not surprising, experts said, given how Moscow likely views the public broadcaster as a mouthpiece for the government, just as critics of RT accuse it of being a propaganda tool for the Russian state.
“Their assumption is that any broadcaster connected to a state one way or another — and they do not differentiate between state media and public media — is fundamentally indistinguishable from RT,” said Samuel Greene, director of the Russia Institute at
