Russia tells BBC journalist to go home in row with UK

Russia’s state TV says move a response to London’s refusal to renew or issue visas to Russian journalists in Britain.

Russia has told a BBC journalist working in Moscow to leave the country by the end of this month in retaliation for what it called London’s discrimination against Russian journalists working in Britain, state TV reported. In an unusual move that signals a further deterioration in already poor ties between London and Moscow, the Rossiya-24 TV channel said on late Thursday that Sarah Rainsford, one of the British broadcaster’s two English-language Moscow correspondents, would be going home in what it called “a landmark deportation”. The step, a de facto expulsion, follows a crackdown before parliamentary elections in September on Russian-language media at home whom the authorities judge to be backed by malign foreign interests intent on stoking unrest.