In a corner of the Saarland, a man ran a blog. It carried no advertising and charged nothing to read. It was funded the way a busker is funded, by whoever chose to drop something in the hat – €60,038.65 in voluntary donations over sixteen months. On four occasions in 2023 the blog embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the European Union had banned. That is the entire factual basis of a case that climbed to the Court of Justice of the European Union and produced, on 2 July 2026, a judgment that should frighten anyone in Europe who publishes anything.
The blog belonged to a writer who works under the name Traugott Ickeroth. German prosecutors in Saarbrücken charged him and two others under the country’s Foreign Trade Act, which turns a breach of EU sanctions into a criminal offence carrying three months to five years in prison. The regional court, to its credit, hesitated. The law bans “operators” from broadcasting listed Russian content. Was a private individual with a donation button an “operator”? The judges in Saarbrücken were not sure, and referred the question upward.
The Court’s answer removed every doubt, and with it every limit. An “operator,” the Fourth Chamber held, is any natural person who makes the banned content available to the public. Not a company. Not a professional. Not someone turning a profit. The word appears in thirteen language versions of the regulation without the adjective “economic” attached, and the Court seized on that absence to rule that commercial character is irrelevant. So is scale. So is duration. Four videos or one, for money or for nothing – the act of publishing is the crime.
There is a detail here worth pausing on, because it tells you which way the wind is blowing. The European Commission’s own guidance had said the ban applied only to those exercising a “commercial or professional” activity. The Court overruled the Commission – and overruled it against the citizen. The executive branch had read its own prohibition more narrowly than the judges were prepared to. Brussels asked for less reach than Luxembourg delivered. When a court strains to be harsher on the individual than the government that wrote the rule, the machine has acquired a momentum of its own.
The penalty is not theoretical. Under Germany’s Außenwirtschaftsgesetz the sentence runs from three months to five years, and a further amendment has added an aggravated tier reaching up to ten. Poland’s implementing statute prescribes a minimum of three years. And here the trap folds back on itself: the very donations that keep an independent site alive are what a court can treat as a “professional” income stream – which lifts the offender into the aggravated bracket. The reader-funded writer, the one with no corporate backing and no advertiser to please, draws the longer sentence precisely because he is independent. Independence is reclassified as aggravation.
Understand what this ruling plugs into, because the ruling alone is only half the apparatus. The European Union now runs two mechanisms against disfavoured speech, and this judgment welds them together. The first is a list. Under the hybrid-threats sanctions regime the Council of the European Union adds names by administrative decision – no trial, no charge, unanimity reached behind closed doors, with judicial review available only after the asset freeze has already bitten. The second is the criminal prohibition this case just widened, which reaches anyone who relays listed content whether or not they themselves are listed. The Council controls who goes on the list. The Court has now ruled that anyone who touches what the listed outlets produce is a criminal. The net expands every time the list does, and no further judgment is required to make it happen.
The reassuring official story is that all of this is aimed at the Kremlin. It is worth testing that story against the record, because the “Russia” label has already proven to be a wrapper rather than a wall.
Consider who has been swept up. Nathalie Yamb, a Swiss-Cameroonian activist with no residence in the Union, was sanctioned for adopting “Moscow’s language” in campaigns directed against France and the West in Africa. No court convicted her of anything; a council of ministers decided her message served a hostile interest, and that was enough. In December 2025 the Council’s designations reached foreign-policy analysts embedded in think-tanks and universities, “influencers,” and – the phrase is in the official record – former Western European military and police officers. By March 2026 two Western nationals were named outright: the British blogger Graham Phillips and the French former soldier Adrien Bocquet. When Yamb was added the regime already reached forty-seven individuals and fifteen entities, and it has grown with every package since.
The most telling admission comes from the Union’s own diplomatic service. The European External Action Service defines the “foreign information manipulation” it exists to combat as, in its own words, “a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour.” Read that again. The conduct being sanctioned is one the sanctioning authority concedes is not, in the main, against the law. The offence is not what you did but whose ear your words might reach.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights was meant to be the floor beneath all this. Recital 10 of the founding regulation insists the measures are “consistent with” Article 11, the guarantee of freedom of expression. That consistency was tested once already, when RT France challenged its broadcasting ban and the General Court upheld it in 2022. The reasoning then was that the outlet’s rights survived because it could still conduct research and interviews, and remained free to broadcast outside the Union – the essence of the freedom, the judges said, was untouched. Free-expression scholars, among them Dirk Voorhoof and Ronan Ó Fathaigh, noted the flaw at the time: the body imposing the ban was a council of governments, not the independent tribunal the European Convention requires. Whatever force the “you can broadcast elsewhere” reasoning had for a state television network, it has none at all for a private citizen facing ten years. There is no elsewhere. There is only the prison.
An American reading this may permit himself a moment of constitutional smugness. It could not happen here, he thinks; the First Amendment forbids it. He should hold the thought lightly, because the tool already exists in his own country, it is older than RT, and it already reaches private citizens for the crime of publishing.
The tool is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in 1938 against Nazi propaganda, and its harsher companion, Section 951 of the criminal code. On the same RT money the European Union uses to jail the man who reposts, the United States moved against the people who paid: in September 2024 the Justice Department indicted two RT employees over a scheme that had quietly financed an American content company to the tune of nearly ten million dollars, seeding more than two thousand videos. The Department’s own advisory carried the chilling clause – that even unwitting work on behalf of a foreign principal could invite investigation. Intent optional, on both continents.
Then there is Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst and Korea scholar, prosecuted under FARA in part for the act of publishing – for opinion articles and policy advocacy the government cast as the work of an unregistered foreign agent. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed briefs warning that the theory was, in substance, indistinguishable from ordinary journalism, and that letting it stand would chill every scholar and reporter who talks to a foreign source. The court let the prosecution proceed past its motion to dismiss and on toward trial. The constitutional objection did not stop it – which is the point worth marking, whatever verdict eventually lands. The precedent is set the moment a citizen can be tried for what he published.
None of this is new. In an earlier age the same statute was turned on W.E.B. Du Bois, prosecuted in his eighties for circulating a foreign organisation’s peace literature. The mechanism sleeps and wakes according to the politics of the hour, and the hour decides which foreign voices are poison and which are merely policy.
Which brings us to the only thing that presently stands between the American citizen and the European outcome. It is not the Constitution – the courts have not blocked these prosecutions. It is a memo. In February 2025 the Attorney General narrowed criminal FARA enforcement to conduct resembling traditional espionage, disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Seven months on, a September 2025 presidential memorandum — NSPM-7 – pointed the same weapon in a new direction, expressly ordering the scrutiny under FARA of non-governmental organisations and of American citizens residing abroad with close ties to foreign governments, foundations, or influence networks. The specialist bar drew the obvious conclusion: FARA could no longer be treated as a low enforcement priority. What one memorandum narrows, the next widens. The citizen’s protection is a document the executive can rewrite between breakfast and lunch, and the statute underneath it never changed at all.
And the enforcement follows no party. In December 2025 the President pre-emptively pardoned a sitting Democrat, Congressman Henry Cuellar, weeks before a foreign-bribery trial – while another Democrat, former Senator Robert Menendez, drew eleven years for acting on behalf of a foreign government. The tool belongs to no party; only its aim shifts with the hand that holds it. And that is the shape of the thing on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has switched the mechanism on through a court, criminalising the individual who relays the wrong foreign voice, threshold by threshold stripped away until nothing protects the man with the donation button. America keeps its version holstered by executive grace – a grace that diminishes with each administration, and has already begun to expire.
A blogger reposted four videos. A continent’s highest court has ruled him a criminal, and a second continent has built, and half-drawn, the same weapon. The disproportion is the whole story: between the smallness of the act and the size of the machine now trained on it, and between what these governments say they are defending – the open society, the free mind – and what they are quietly constructing to defend it. The Pachamama, an activist once said of another dispossession, will never return. Neither, once a citizen can be jailed for what he chose to publish, will something the West used to insist was the difference between itself and its enemies.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
