CEE/Newsletter/Newsroom/Wikimedia RU Completely Terminated
- By: Lvova
On February 26, 2025, the final closure of the Wikimedia RU nonprofit organization took place. This had been announced in December 2023, following the Russian government's designation of the organization’s director, Stas Kozlovskiy, as a "foreign agent."
The timeline for the closure depended on completing formal procedures, some of which — such as publishing an official closure announcement — required time. Additionally, resolving financial matters inherited by the organization in May 2023 from its previous director took extra time.
In March 2023, while already in the process of liquidation, the organization was added to the list of so-called "foreign agents" — a consequence of the "contagious" nature of this status, which had previously been assigned to its director. This created one of the key challenges of liquidation: the remaining funds had to be spent, but any recipient risked being designated a foreign agent as well. Spending the money on souvenir products for potential future events — ones that were not organizationally linked to the partnership — would have required extending the liquidation process. Ultimately, the final action of Wikimedia RU was to fund a state-run nonprofit project dedicated to the restoration of ancient manuscripts in Russian and Persian.