CJEU Judgment in Case C‑67/25: Russian Disinformation and Content Creator Liability
On July 2, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C‑67/25 that a private individual who runs a website and posts content from RT on it is an “operator” bound by the EU broadcast ban, and that it makes no difference whether the site earns money, or how: a blog kept alive by readers’ donations is covered just as a licensed broadcaster is. The Fourth Chamber followed the conclusion, and most of the reasoning, of the Opinion delivered by Advocate General Rimvydas Norkus on February 12, 2026. Three German bloggers, prosecuted in Saarbrücken over four videos, now return to a criminal court that already knows the answer to the question it asked. Every other content creator in Europe would do well to read that answer too.
Somewhere in the Saarland, that sliver of Germany wedged between France and Luxembourg, a region better known for its steel heritage than for its contributions to European jurisprudence, a man who went by the pseudonym “Traugott Ickeroth” ran a blog. The blog, called “Live-Ticker”, was hosted on a website bearing his nom de plume, and it offered what its creators apparently regarded as an alternative to the mainstream press: a curated stream of commentary, links, and, crucially, videos sourced from RT Deutschland, the German-language arm of Russia’s state-funded media apparatus. Access was free. There were no ads, no subscription paywalls, no sponsorship deals. The site’s operators did, however, ask for donations. Between April, 2022, and August, 2023, readers obliged to the tune of more than sixty thousand euros.
This, it turned out, was not merely a matter of questionable editorial judgment. It was, according to German prosecutors, a crime, one that sits at the intersection of EU sanctions law, information warfare, and the rapidly expanding universe of online content liability. Case C‑67/25 is far more than a provincial criminal proceeding. It is one of the first prosecutions to reach a relay in the chain by which content banned in the European Union keeps circulating: a chain in which seemingly independent blogs, social media accounts, and video channels pass on propaganda from outlets under Kremlin control, whether or not anyone directs them to. Nothing in the judgment says that the Saarbrücken defendants were paid or steered from Moscow, and nothing in this article should be read as saying so; the accusation is that they relayed the content, which is what the ban forbids. And since July 2, 2026, it is also the case in which the Court of Justice told every court in the Union how far that ban reaches.
The EU Broadcast Prohibition and RT Ban: Case C‑67/25
Ickeroth and two associates were charged in Saarbrücken, over four videos posted in 2023, with violating European Union sanctions, specifically Article 2f(1) of Council Regulation No. 833/2014, which prohibits the broadcasting, or the enabling, facilitating, or otherwise contributing to the broadcasting, of any content produced by entities listed in the regulation’s Annex XV. RT Deutschland is on that list. The judgment, which anonymizes the defendants as R, N and K, records the accusation as suspected participation in a criminal association whose business was those four uploads. It also records the details that give the case its texture: R publishes books under his pseudonym, sold through Amazon; he is recorded as having acknowledged during the investigation that he was responsible for the editorial design of the site; and between April 1, 2022, and August 3, 2023, the appeal for donations brought 60,038.65 euros into accounts belonging to R and N. The sanctions violation penalties under Germany’s Foreign Trade Act carry a sentence of three months to five years in prison. The case was assigned the bureaucratically unassuming docket number 8 KLs 33/24.
What happened next elevated the matter into something considerably more consequential. The Landgericht Saarbrücken, the regional court handling the case, found itself uncertain about a seemingly simple question of media operator definition: does the word “operator”, as used in Article 2f(1), apply to a private individual running a donations-funded website? The court did what EU law entitles it to do in moments of interpretive doubt. By a decision of December 20, 2024, it referred the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union, in Luxembourg, noting, in a sentence the defence will not forget, that the interpretation of the concept was “not obvious enough to rule out any reasonable doubt”.
The reference reached Luxembourg on January 31, 2025. The Saarbrücken court asked for priority treatment; the President of the Court declined it on March 3, 2025. Written observations came from the governments of Estonia, France and Latvia, three countries with their own reasons to care how far the ban reaches, and from the European Commission. There was no hearing. On February 12, 2026, Advocate General Rimvydas Norkus delivered his opinion; on July 2, 2026, the Fourth Chamber delivered its judgment (ECLI:EU:C:2026:534). The Court’s answer, rendered in the lapidary prose characteristic of CJEU legal reasoning, was unequivocal, and its implications for anyone who publishes content online extend far beyond a blog in the Saarland.
Russian Propaganda and Hybrid Warfare: Why This Case Matters
To understand why a pseudonymous blogger’s legal troubles matter, it helps to appreciate the architecture of the prohibition he is accused of violating, and the broader machinery of Russian disinformation it was designed to dismantle.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, the European Union moved with unusual speed to impose sanctions. Among the EU sanctions against Russia adopted in the first days of March was Regulation 2022/350, which suspended the broadcasting activities of several Russian state-controlled media outlets, a direct response to what the Kremlin’s systematic campaign of media manipulation had become. RT and Sputnik propaganda were the principal targets. The regulation’s preamble was blunt: the Russian Federation, it stated, had been conducting “a systematic, international campaign of media manipulation and distortion of facts” aimed at destabilizing the EU and its member states. Russian state media were described as posing “a significant and direct threat to the Union’s public order and public security”. The ban covered RT’s German, English, French, and Spanish services as well as Sputnik, encompassing all forms of transmission, including distribution via the Internet. The Court went back to the same documents: its judgment recalls the European Council’s call of February 24, 2022, on Russia to stop its disinformation campaign, and the Council’s conclusions of May 10, 2021, on hybrid threats, and reads the ban as an instrument of both (paragraph 51).
The instrument chosen to implement this finding was Article 2f, inserted into the existing sanctions framework of Regulation 833/2014. Its language is broad by design. It prohibits “operators” from broadcasting, or from enabling, facilitating, or otherwise contributing to the broadcasting of, any content by the entities listed in Annex XV, “including through transmission or distribution by any means such as cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service providers, internet video-sharing platforms or applications, whether new or pre-installed”. The provision reads less like a scalpel and more like a dragnet.
But the regulation never defines “operator”. And it is precisely into this lacuna that the Saarbrücken case fell.
RT Deutschland: a brief, troubled history. RT (formerly Russia Today) is not an ordinary television network. It is the flagship of Russian state propaganda abroad, funded directly from the Russian federal budget. The Atlantic Council has documented annual budgets ranging from $236 million (2015) to $445 million (2014). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in 2021 that RT America’s production company had by then received more than $100 million from RT’s parent entity, ANO TV-Novosti. According to Debunk.org, Russia spent an estimated 143 billion rubles ($1.9 billion) from its federal budget on media in 2022. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice required RT’s American production company to register as a foreign agent under FARA, following intelligence-community findings about RT’s role in Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.
In Germany, RT DE Productions GmbH launched its television channel on December 16, 2021, a date that, in retrospect, carried a certain dramatic irony, arriving just two months before the invasion that would ultimately doom the enterprise. The channel never obtained a German broadcasting license. It attempted to operate under a Serbian one, an arrangement that the ZAK, the German commission responsible for licensing and supervising broadcasters, found unacceptable. On February 1, 2022, the ZAK ordered RT DE to cease broadcasting, not because of geopolitics but because of straightforward EU media law: a channel produced and run from Germany needs a German licence, and a Serbian one does not stand in for it. As MDR explained, the ban was a purely regulatory decision, entirely unrelated to the war in Ukraine. The EU-wide sanctions that followed a month later were, as far as RT DE’s television programme was concerned, redundant; their scope, however, was far wider, reaching not the channel but its content, wherever it resurfaced.
Sanctions Circumvention: How Banned Russian Media Survive Online
What the sanctions did not accomplish, however, was the disappearance of RT’s content from the Internet. This was always the structural weakness of the regime, and everyone involved appears to have known it; the Advocate General himself acknowledged as much in footnote 34 of his opinion.
RT Deutschland promptly established a network of mirror domains, sites hosted on servers belonging to TV-Novosti, the RT parent entity founded by RIA Novosti, and to Rostelecom, Russia’s state-owned telecommunications operator. A Correctiv.Faktencheck investigation published four days after the Advocate General’s opinion identified more than twenty active mirror domains accessible from German territory, collectively drawing an estimated 2.6 million visits a month. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur, the federal network agency, conceded that these mirrors constitute a Schwachstelle, a weak point, in sanctions enforcement, and acknowledged that it no longer conducts close monitoring. Correctiv had been documenting this circumvention since 2022. Fact-checking, in this domain, has become a race against a machine producing disinformation at industrial scale.
The Doppelganger operation: who is behind the fake news. Alongside individual bloggers, Russia has been running organized disinformation campaigns employing internet bots and Russian trolls to amplify their reach. The operation known as Doppelganger, attributed to the Moscow-based Social Design Agency (SDA), involved creating counterfeit websites mimicking the appearance of established European news organizations (EU DisinfoLab gave it its name because of its systematic use of “cloned” sites) and disseminating pro-Russian narratives and fake news through coordinated social media manipulation. The operation has been documented by U.S. Cyber Command, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. A technical report by the German Foreign Ministry published in 2024 identified nine German-language Doppelganger clones of major media outlets and sixteen artificial news portals. Later iterations of the campaign reached for generative AI, including deepfake-style material.
Russian influence operations in Europe. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has warned repeatedly about Russian influence operations on German soil, including attempted election interference. In a public hearing before the Bundestag, in October, 2024, the BfV’s then president, Thomas Haldenwang, drew attention to Einflussoperationen, influence operations, conducted by Russian intelligence services spreading disinformation across Europe.
The operational model: from the Kremlin to the local blog. The pattern is consistent and repeatable: content originates with or is inspired by Russian state media; it migrates to mirror domains and proxy sites; it is then picked up and redistributed by “alternative” outlets (blogs, YouTube channels, Telegram accounts) that present themselves as independent voices of dissent against the “mainstream”. Propaganda on social media is amplified by coordinated networks of bots and troll farms, while donation funding supplies the appearance of independence. Audiences, persuaded of the content’s authenticity, become its further distributors, unwitting participants in a chain of distribution of banned content. On the facts recorded in the judgment, “Live-Ticker” matches the outer form of this model: RT content, an “alternative” platform, donation funding. Whether anything more lay behind it is a question the judgment does not answer. It is this systemic reality, not any finding about the three defendants, that gave the Saarbrücken court’s seemingly technical question its strategic weight. The Court, in its own idiom, described the same chain: a narrow reading of the ban “would allow operators who derive no income from the operation of their website freely to broadcast” the prohibited content, “thereby actively contributing to disinformation and destabilisation campaigns” run by outlets under the permanent control of the Russian leadership (paragraph 53).
The Judgment of July 2, 2026: How the Court Defined the Media Operator
The question referred to Luxembourg might sound narrow: does “operator” include a natural person whose website generates revenue only from voluntary donations? Before the Court could answer it, it had to decide whether to answer it at all. The Saarbrücken prosecutor’s office, without formally pleading inadmissibility, argued that the reference was unnecessary: the meaning of the provision was self-evident, a first-instance court had no business asking so early, and the case had other factual and legal threads that an appellate court might see differently. The Court’s reply is a small masterclass for any lawyer who wants a preliminary reference over the objection of the other side. National courts enjoy “the widest discretion” to refer, at whatever stage they consider appropriate, a line the Court traced back to Rheinmühlen-Düsseldorf in 1974 (paragraph 22), and the fact that one party finds the answer obvious does not make the question inadmissible (paragraph 31). The question was in. (Quotations below are taken from the provisional English text of the judgment; the language of the case is German.)
On the merits, the Court applied the method EU law prescribes: the wording of the provision, its context, and its purpose (paragraph 34). It reached the same conclusion on each axis, and the conclusion is the one the Advocate General had proposed.
The text. The regulation does not define “operator” and does not refer to national law, so the word takes its usual meaning in everyday language. Applied to the broadcasting of media and digital content, the Court held, it refers to “any natural or legal person directly or indirectly responsible for making available or transmitting that content to the public” (paragraph 38). The Court then did something the opinion had not done with the same thoroughness: it went through the language versions. In the vast majority of them, thirteen are listed by name, from Bulgarian to Finnish, the word stands alone, unaccompanied by the adjective “economic” (paragraph 39). The provision, moreover, names “internet video-sharing platforms or applications”, tools that are generally free and used in activities that are not necessarily remunerated (paragraph 40). Hence, on a literal reading, an operator is anyone responsible for broadcasting or making available the listed content, “including in the context of a non-remunerated activity or in the operation of a website financed by voluntary contributions from third parties” (paragraph 41).
The Commission’s FAQs. The Saarbrücken court had relied on the Commission’s working document, the “Consolidated FAQs on the implementation of Council Regulation No. 833/2014”, which says the ban applies to any person “exercising a commercial or professional activity”. The Court, following point 46 of the opinion, called the FAQs what they are: a working document of the Commission’s services, not legally binding, offering guidance and nothing more (paragraph 43). It then went further than politeness required. The FAQs, it said, “introduce a requirement which is not apparent from the wording” of the provision, and the commercial-or-professional test “tends unduly to restrict the scope ratione personae” of the ban (paragraph 44). They “cannot alter the scope of the restrictive measures” (paragraph 45). Anyone who has built a sanctions compliance programme on the FAQs alone should read that sentence twice. Norkus had put the point institutionally: the FAQs come from Commission staff, not from the Council, the regulation’s sole author and the only institution competent to adopt restrictive measures under Article 215(2) TFEU.
The context. Article 2f(1) differs from provisions of the same regulation that expressly speak of “economic” operators, such as Article 3r(4), on the transshipment of Russian liquefied natural gas, which the Court again checked across thirteen language versions (paragraph 47). Where the legislature meant to confine a restrictive measure to economic actors, it said so; in Article 2f(1) it did not, and the concept of operator is defined solely by reference to the broadcasting of the listed content, “irrespective of the status of the operator concerned and of whether or not his or her activity is economic in nature” (paragraph 48). The consequence is stated without hedging: whether an activity is economic, and whether it generates income, “cannot constitute a relevant criterion” for deciding whether a person is covered by the prohibition (paragraph 49).
The purpose. The Court recalled that Article 2f was inserted by Regulation 2022/350 one week after the invasion, as an immediate reaction to it, and that the ban serves a twofold objective: protecting public order and security in the Union against a systematic campaign of media manipulation, and adding pressure on Russia to end its aggression (paragraphs 51 and 52). The reading urged by two of the defendants, K and R, which would confine the ban to commercial, profit-seeking actors, “would deprive that prohibition of its effectiveness” (paragraph 53). As commentators on Verfassungsblog have emphasized, these measures, unlike economic sanctions, serve an “inward-directed” purpose: preventing the destabilization of the Union through disinformation. An economic-activity requirement, nowhere stated in the text, would gut it.
Duration and scale. R had a fallback: only broadcasting of a certain duration should count, not isolated publications of negligible scope. The Court rejected it in two sentences. Neither the provision nor the regulation makes the extent or duration of broadcasting relevant, and such a reading “would, in any event, be liable to encourage conduct aimed at circumventing that provision by artificially fragmenting the broadcasting” of the banned content (paragraph 56). Only an interpretation that depends neither on the commercial nature of the activity, nor on its method of financing, nor on the extent or duration of the broadcasting, the Court concluded, serves the purpose of the provision (paragraph 57).
The operative part answers the Saarbrücken court in one sentence: a natural person who operates a website by broadcasting on it content from the entities listed in Annex XV, and who derives from that website only income from voluntary contributions from third parties, in the form of donations or gifts, comes within the concept of “operator” (paragraph 58). It is, almost word for word, what Norkus had proposed. His opinion had added a warning the Court did not repeat but did not need to: a narrow reading, he wrote, would permit a gradual transfer of the broadcasting of prohibited content to alternative channels that escape all forms of state control or oversight, and the very claim to independence of such channels may become an instrument of effectiveness in the service of disinformation strategies. What else the Court did not repeat is a subject of its own, and it comes below.
Donation-Funded Media and the Risk of Media Manipulation
The point about donations was especially acute, and it is here that both the opinion and the judgment transcend their immediate facts and speak to the structural vulnerabilities of the modern information ecosystem.
The Court separated two things the referring court had run together. The first is classification: whether the site earns money is irrelevant, full stop. The second is risk, and on risk the Court adopted the Advocate General’s assessment (points 60 and 62 of the opinion) as its own. Financing a website through voluntary contributions from third parties, it held, “hinders, in principle, the ability to trace the origin of the funding and, consequently, any influence being exerted on the content broadcast”; such a model “may thus be capable of facilitating, directly or indirectly, interference by foreign interests”, third-country interests included, and is therefore “capable of increasing the risk that such a website may be used to relay the propaganda campaign” the regulation seeks to prohibit (paragraph 54). By the standards of a judgment on the meaning of a single word, it is a remarkably pointed paragraph, less legal analysis than threat assessment.
The Advocate General had gone further. Donation-funded outlets, he observed, operate without the transparency obligations or regulatory oversight that apply to professional media operators. Their financial flows are difficult to trace. Their editorial independence is hard to verify. And their posture as grassroots alternatives to the mainstream confers what he called a greater power of persuasion, which makes their content harder to challenge when it carries partially manipulated or false information. He also treated the size of the donations as a contextual indicator of how organized the activity was; sixty thousand euros in sixteen months is not the footprint of a private opinion. The Court neither adopted nor rejected that indicator, so it remains for the national court, and the referring court has already shown, in its own order, which way it leans on it (paragraph 15); the section on penalties explains why.
This observation acquires particular force in the context of documented Russian influence operations. Doppelganger showed that the Kremlin will go to the trouble of cloning trusted outlets to borrow the appearance of independence. Donation-funded “alternative” media offer that appearance ready-made, with nothing to clone. The model of an “alternative medium sustained by community donations” is, in effect, the ideal vehicle for such a strategy: it provides an appearance of authenticity, complicates the tracking of financial flows, and builds audience loyalty founded on a sense of belonging to a community of “independent thinkers”.
European and American law answer this problem differently, and the difference is instructive. Writing about how the F.S.B. bought an American protest movement for seven thousand dollars, I argued that the honest answer to a foreign agent of influence is disclosure of the principal, not censorship: FARA does not ban content, it makes the payer visible. Article 2f asks for no disclosure; it bans content by reference to its source. The Court reached for the opacity of the funding to justify the breadth of the ban (paragraph 54); opacity is precisely the problem FARA addresses by registration. Both routes can end in a criminal court, since a wilful FARA violation is a felony too. The European one gets there without ever asking who paid.
Donations, then, are not legally irrelevant: they do not constitute a threshold for classification, but they strengthen the risk assessment. In the context of Article 12 of Regulation 833/2014, which prohibits the circumvention of sanctions, they may serve as evidence of an instrumentalized operation. That last step is the Advocate General’s; the judgment says nothing about Article 12.
Freedom of Speech, Proportionality, and the Limits of the Ban
Norkus did not deliver a blank check for prosecution, and his opinion should not be mistaken for an instrument of internet censorship. It contains safeguards that are as significant as its expansive reading of “operator”, and that are easy to overlook.
He invoked, prominently, the principle of nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege certa, the requirement, enshrined in Article 49(1) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, that criminal offenses be defined with sufficient clarity and predictability. A person must be able, at the time of acting, to foresee the criminal consequences of his conduct. This principle, Norkus wrote, citing settled case law, precludes criminal proceedings over conduct whose illegality is not set out in law clearly and unequivocally enough.
He also subjected the regulation to the proportionality test required by Article 52(1) of the Charter, which permits restrictions on fundamental rights, including freedom of speech and the freedom of expression and information guaranteed by Article 11, only if they are provided for by law, respect the essence of the right, and pursue an objective of general interest in a proportionate manner. The ban, Norkus concluded, meets these conditions: it is temporary, it targets specific content identified as propaganda, and it does not restrict the free flow of other information or opinion. It is not intended, he wrote, to limit freedom of expression in general, but solely to prevent serious and direct threats to the security and public order of the Union. One thing the proportionality analysis does not do is turn the ban into a truth test. Article 2f(1) is source-based: it covers “any content” by a listed entity (paragraph 35). A prosecutor need not prove that a particular clip was false, and a defendant cannot answer that it was true. That is what makes the ban enforceable, and it is why the safeguards that follow carry the weight they do.
Here the judgment is leaner than the opinion, and the leanness is the most important difference between them. The Court answered the question of interpretation and nothing else. It did not repeat the analysis under Articles 11, 49 and 52 of the Charter; the Charter appears only at one remove, in recital 10 of Regulation 2022/350, which the Court quotes and which declares the ban consistent with freedom of expression. The safeguards have not vanished. The Charter binds every national court that applies Article 2f, whether or not the judgment restates it (Article 51(1) of the Charter), and the opinion remains available as reasoning to borrow, if not as a norm to apply. What has changed is where the argument must be won: not in Luxembourg, which has finished with the case, but before a national judge examining what the defendants did and what they knew.
The Court has, if anything, raised the stakes. Since neither the extent nor the duration of broadcasting matters, the concept of operator captures a single post. What stands between the definition and a conviction is, first, what the person actually did (the Court defined “operator”, not “broadcast”, and said nothing about quotation, critique or reporting, questions the judgment leaves open) and, second, what the person knew. Here a popular reassurance needs correcting. Criminal law requires intent as to the act: one must know that the content one is putting before the public comes from a listed outlet. It does not require knowledge that doing so is illegal. Under Section 17 of the German Criminal Code, ignorance of the ban excuses only if it was unavoidable; an avoidable mistake at most mitigates the sentence, and after a judgment of the Court of Justice reported across Europe, unavoidable ignorance will be a hard case to make. The person who unwittingly shares a clip from a sanctioned source while scrolling through Telegram is still not in the same position as the person who systematically republishes RT content on a dedicated platform while soliciting donations to sustain the operation; but the distance between them is measured in intent and avoidability, not in innocence. Nor is the unwitting share entirely free of consequence: under Section 19 of the Foreign Trade Act, a negligent violation is an administrative offence punishable by a fine. The mens rea requirement, the guilty mind, remains the essential filter between the regulation’s sweeping scope and the criminal law’s demand for individual culpability. It is a finer mesh than most creators assume.
One argument the judgment leaves open is likely to be made in Saarbrücken. The referring court wrote in 2024 that the meaning of “operator” was not obvious enough to rule out reasonable doubt, and the Commission’s own FAQs had for years suggested a narrower reading. If a professional court harboured doubts in 2024, the defence will ask, how was a blogger expected to have none in 2023? The prosecution’s answer is easy to predict: the Court derived the result from the ordinary meaning of an ordinary word, available to anyone who cared to look, and the prosecution had said from the start that the provision was clear. Which argument prevails is for the national court. It is an assessment, not a certainty.
Sanctions Violation Penalties Across the EU: What Content Creators Need to Know
The formal conclusion of the Advocate General’s opinion was a single paragraph of lapidary precision: “operator” includes natural persons who run a website, and it is irrelevant, for that classification, whether such persons derive income of any kind from it. The Court of Justice is not bound by an opinion; here it adopted the opinion’s conclusion. The ruling is a landmark in EU media law, and its ramifications extend well beyond the Saarland.
In Germany, the Foreign Trade Act imposes prison sentences of three months to five years for sanctions violations, as confirmed by Rödl & Partner and KPMG Law. A February, 2026, amendment implementing the EU sanctions directive introduced a range of six months to ten years for particularly serious cases; whether that provision reaches the broadcasting ban at all is a question of its precise wording, and it cannot in any event reach conduct from 2023. The judgment also records a provision that may matter more in Saarbrücken than the definition of operator ever did: under Section 18(7)(2) of the Foreign Trade Act, a person who acts in a professional capacity (in the German original gewerbsmäßig, a term with its own case law and its own requirements) faces a minimum of one year in prison (paragraph 8). The referring court had itself suggested that collecting donations on a scale that finances, even in part, the recipients’ living costs can amount to a professional activity (paragraph 15). The donations that the Court found irrelevant to the concept of operator thus come back through the side door: they do not decide whether the ban applies, but they may decide the floor of the sentence. For creators who live on their audience’s generosity, that is the most practical lesson of the case. In Poland, the Act of April 13, 2022, on sanctions enforcement prescribes a minimum of three years’ imprisonment for the basic offence. Similar implementing legislation exists across the Union.
The practical upshot is that online content liability has acquired a criminal-law dimension that most content creators have never considered, and that, since July 2, 2026, rests on a binding interpretation rather than a prediction. The prohibition itself is four years old; what the judgment adds is certainty about whom it binds. The question “What can I post online?” now requires familiarity not only with copyright law and platform terms of service but with EU sanctions regulations, media law, and national implementing statutes. Blogger legal liability, once largely a matter of defamation and intellectual property, now encompasses the legality of reposting material from sanctioned sources. The responsibility for sharing content, whether on a YouTube channel, a TikTok account, a podcast, or a personal blog, extends to knowing not just whose content you are distributing but whether you are permitted to distribute it at all.
And there is a deeper irony embedded in the case. The very features that make donation-funded alternative media attractive to their audiences, the independence from corporate interests, the rejection of mainstream narratives, the sense of community built around shared skepticism, are precisely the features that make them useful to a state-run disinformation apparatus seeking new vectors for prohibited content. The Advocate General saw this clearly. So, it turns out, did the Court, which said it in a paragraph of its own.
What happens next is procedural and, in its way, more interesting than the ruling. The case returns to the Landgericht Saarbrücken, which will apply the Court’s interpretation to the facts and examine everything the Court was not asked about: intent, awareness of the ban, and the scale of the enterprise. But the interpretation binds every court in the Union. A Telegram channel in Riga, a YouTube account in Lyon, a blog in Warsaw that relays content from Annex XV now face a question with a settled answer, and Annex XV has grown since 2022; in May, 2024, it acquired, among others, Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, with further outlets added in 2025.
The man behind the pseudonym Traugott Ickeroth presumably did not set out to become a test case in European sanctions law. He has become one anyway; the judgment carries the name of his website in its statement of facts. The Internet has a way of collapsing the distance between a provincial blog and a continent-wide legal principle. In the architecture of modern disinformation, it turns out, even the smallest relay matters, and knowing where a clip comes from, rather than whether it happens to be true, is no longer merely a matter of media literacy but of staying on the right side of the criminal law.
Criminal Defence
In Poland the evidence that decides a criminal case is gathered before the trial, not at it. We enter the case at the first summons and stay through interrogations, indictment and cassation.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
