US Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled new restrictions on Friday targeting RT parent companies Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti. He accused the network of being “engaged in covert influence activities… and functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.”

   “The degree of aggression with which all of this was expressed is off the scale. I think this is definitely a declaration of information war. It went on behind the scenes through the sanctions policy, but there was no declaration that the Russian media would now be openly attacked,” Zakharova stated.

   The renewed attack on Russian media was prompted solely by “jealousy” in the West “because they could not compete” with it fairly, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. Washington has provided no actual evidence to back up its allegations against the outlets, she added.

   “When they say that’s because RT is doing something wrong in the US, if it violated at least one American law, if at least one fake was a sign of some kind of global information campaign that RT is conducting on the territory of the US, if even one RT correspondent had engaged in illegal activities, and an American court of some state or maybe even a Pan-American court would have conducted some kind of investigation long ago, a verdict would have been carried out. But there’s nothing to show.”

   This new development should be a wake-up call for media outlets worldwide, Zakharova said, warning that any broadcaster could become the next target.

   “This suggests that journalists all over the world should now understand that tomorrow this will be done to them. Therefore, if the media community does not unite now, if every media corporation head does not understand this, tomorrow… it will be too late,” the spokeswoman warned.