"The Voice of America ... has ceased its on-air Russian-language radio broadcasts as of July 26. The broadcasts were stopped despite concerns expressed by U.S. lawmakers and human rights NGOs that freedom of speech remains restricted in Russia. In an apparent effort to limit negative publicity and possible embarrassment, neither VOA nor BBG issued any public statements in English prior to taking the programs off the air after more than sixty years of uninterrupted broadcasting. A one paragraph announcement on the VOA Russian language web site, posted on July 26, stated that as of next day VOA programming in Russian will be available only through the Internet." Ted Lipien, Blogger News Network, 29 July 2008.
     Sergei writes: "The closure of VoA's Russian radio service hasn't been reported widely in the Russian-language press. Estonian delfi.ee was the first to notice the event. Delfi's report was timely reprinted by famous Russian daily Izvestia [31 July 2008, in Russian]. The article is titled somewhat misleadingly The Voice of America Left Russia's Air. Instead of its Russian programming, VoA's AM affiliate in Moscow (810 kHz) now carries English instruction broadcasts. SW frequencies used by the VoA's Russian are off for now. Will they be picked up by R.Libery Russian?"
     Kai Ludwig writes: "So much for the promise to restore the funding of Russian broadcasts [by the Senate Appropriations Committee]. ... On Aug 1st the Russian service of Radio Liberty starts to use the transmitter hours of the now gone VOA broadcasts in Russian, mostly on the old frequencies. ... So the shortwave transmissions of Radio Liberty in Russian will not be curtailed but instead even expanded, at least for now (I would not rule out that it is just temporarily until they can cancel the airtime)."
     The last VOA Russian broadcasts, on Saturday, are available on this page for the next couple of days. Even if you do not have Russian, you can tell that that these are farewell programs.
     "Just after former Russian President Vladimir Putin anointed his political successor last December, the Web site of Russian opposition leader Carry Kasparov was hit by [denial of service] attacks for nearly two weeks." Foreign Policy, July/August 2008.
     See also ProPublica, 24 July 2008.