The BBC Russian Service radio station, which has been designated one of the BBC’s top global priorities in the years ahead, has been ordered off the FM airwaves by the country’s regulators. The last of the Russian Service’s three local distribution partners, Bolshoye Radio, was ordered to remove the BBC from its programming or face being shut down itself.

This, by itself, is a gross abuse of state power. The Russian state has ordered the BBC out of business to prevent the propagation of foreign and free ideas that might prove dangerous to the neo-Soviet Kremlin. This abuse of state power is done under the pretext of defending local producers (itself an despicable act of protectionism), which makes it even harder to fathom.

But there’s another side to the argument, and one that hasn’t been lost on the Russians. In defending the removal of the BBC from its station’s programming, Bolshoye Radio spokesperson Igor Ermachenkov said:

Any media which is government-financed is propaganda. It’s a fact - it’s not negative.

Surprisingly enough, this Russkie gets it. The state has no role to play in the media - broadcast, printed, online, or otherwise - and that applies to state broadcasting as it does to state censorship. Two months ago, the BBC admitted that it’s institutionally biased: that it abuses its remit of ‘public-interest’ broadcasting to propagate the civil service’s left-wing ideas. And since the BBC extracts its revenue by taxing its rivals’ services, its bias is funded by what (in the economic short-term) amounts to monopoly power.

The sad thing is that both Russia and the United Kingdom fail to apply the principle of non-involvement with any consistency or morality, with any respect for the underlying reason for our opposition. It’s fashionable for everyone - left and right - to oppose Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical government, and, as it is fast becoming one of the most unfree countries this side of Zimbabwe, that criticism is justified. Just as justified is criticism of the BBC, which applies Putin’s principles with a smug smile on its face, confident that neither this country’s people nor government understand why it must be shut down, just as it has been in Russia.