Russia Today Opened Its Odysee Channel Four Days After Invading Ukraine — Today the Livestream Has 50,316 LBC Pinned On It

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Within seventy-two hours every major Western distribution platform had cut off RT (Russia Today, formerly Russia Today TV) and Sputnik in EU territory: YouTube globally suspended RT's monetisation and blocked its EU access; Meta restricted RT and Sputnik EU-wide; Apple removed the RT and Sputnik apps from the App Store; Google de-listed both from Google News and Play Store; Microsoft removed the apps from the Microsoft Store. On 1 March 2022 the EU Council issued Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351, formally prohibiting the broadcast and distribution of RT and Sputnik content in the EU until further notice. The decision remains in force in 2026.

Odysee's @RT channel was created on 28 February 2022. Four days after the invasion. The same week every other major distribution platform was cutting RT off. Odysee — incorporated in the United States, accessible without restriction from every EU Member State, subject to the EU Digital Services Act — gave RT a fresh channel and a fresh distribution surface. The channel remains live today. The top item on it is staked at 50,316.83 LBC.

What @RT Looks Like Today

Per our 30 May scan, the channel holds 31,649 total claims (a very large catalogue, consistent with a state-broadcaster archive) and 38 of those match our violation keywords — a 0.1% flagged share. The flagged-share number is low because RT pumps a high volume of conventional news content that doesn't trip keyword matches; the staked-amount distribution tells the story instead. The top staked items:

The 50,316 LBC stake on a perpetual 24/7 livestream is the structural anomaly. A livestream URL is uniformly low-engagement on Odysee — viewers come and go, no individual segment accumulates demand. A 50,000+ LBC stake on a livestream URL is therefore the same self-staking fingerprint we've been documenting since May (the original 29, the 50-channel follow-up, and the founder's own self-stake pattern): the same wallet that publishes the content also bankrolls its search-rank placement. In this case the wallet is presumptively operated by, or on behalf of, Russia's state broadcaster.

The Sanctions and Distribution-Prohibition Stack

The legal framework that applies to RT's distribution on Odysee is unusually crisp. The relevant instruments:

• EU Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351 of 1 March 2022: prohibits the broadcast, transmission, or distribution by any means — cable, satellite, IPTV, internet platform, or app store — of RT and Sputnik content within the EU until further notice. The decision was reviewed and reaffirmed annually 2023, 2024, and 2025.
• EU Council Regulation (EU) 2022/350: the corresponding regulation giving the prohibition direct effect in Member States. Article 2f specifically targets "providers of intermediary services" — which under DSA terminology unambiguously includes Odysee.
• UK Ofcom revocation decision (18 March 2022): revoked RT's UK broadcast licence under the Broadcasting Act 1990 §3, citing loss of "fit and proper" status.
• US FARA designation (Nov 2017, expanded 2024): RT operates in the US as a registered Foreign Agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. US Treasury OFAC in 2024 expanded designations covering elements of the Russian state-media operations Bonanza Media and certain RT America successor entities.
• EU DSA Article 9 government orders: the EU's Member State DSCs have standing to issue Article 9 takedown orders for content that breaches EU law. Distribution of CFSP 2022/351-prohibited material is, by definition, in breach.

Each instrument independently requires Odysee's parent entity to either geo-block RT distribution within the EU or terminate the @RT channel entirely. Neither has happened. The channel is reachable without restriction from every EU Member State today. Odysee's total absence of DSA Article 15 transparency reporting means there is no platform-side documentation of whether any CFSP 2022/351 takedown notices have been received, processed, or refused. The reasonable working assumption — supported by every takedown-test we've run since November 2025 (register) — is that no Article 9 takedown order has been served, or that any served has been ignored.

How Other Decentralised Platforms Handled It

Odysee's "we're decentralised, the EU distribution-prohibition doesn't apply" defence — if it were to be raised — has a published counter-example. The Cloudflare, IPFS, and Brave ecosystems all chose differently in 2022. Cloudflare terminated RT's CDN service. The Brave browser added RT to its default search-blacklist for EU users. IPFS gateway operators (Pinata, Fleek, Cloudflare's own gateway) blacklisted the RT content hashes. Each of these actors made an individual product decision that the cost of distributing sanctioned content was higher than the cost of implementing a takedown. Odysee's decision in the same window was to create the channel.

The Constructive-Knowledge Problem (Again)

Under DSA Article 16, a hosting provider must act expeditiously to disable access to content once it has actual knowledge of its illegality. The CFSP 2022/351 prohibition is the textbook actual-knowledge trigger: a publicly-promulgated EU Council decision, indexed and machine-readable, naming RT and Sputnik specifically. There is no "we needed a takedown notice to know" defence available — the prohibition is constructive notice by operation of EU law to every intermediary serving EU users. Odysee's continued hosting of @RT, four years and three months after the prohibition entered force, is a persistent breach of Article 16 that compounds the Article 15 transparency-reporting breach we documented separately.

What Should Happen

The minimum viable response from Odysee would be to (a) geo-block EU access to the @RT channel and to any successor handles (including any handle that has "RT", "Russia Today", or "Sputnik" in its on-platform metadata), (b) publish an Article 17 statement of reasons documenting the action and the legal basis (CFSP 2022/351), and (c) implement a forward-looking automated check against the EU sanctions list so that future state-media replacements don't require seventeen months to surface. All three are technically routine.

The minimum viable response from EU Member State DSCs is an Article 9 takedown order, coordinated through the European Board for Digital Services, directed at the @RT channel and any successor handles. The Board has standing to coordinate exactly this kind of cross-Member-State action against a non-established platform; the legal infrastructure is in place; the precedent is the same Article 9 order regime already exercised against Telegram channels distributing CFSP-prohibited content in 2023-2024.

We have served Article 16 notices on @RT to Odysee's support address, with CC to Coimisiún na Meán, ARCOM, and BNetzA, and a copy to the European External Action Service's East StratCom Task Force (EUvsDisinfo). Status checks at +30, +60, and +90 days will land on the takedown-tests register.