So a new interesting wrinkle in the back and forth between the United States

and Russia. Yeah, indeed the United States government announced that in this is Assad. I don't

know if it's completely unprecedented or what, but that the RT network, the Russian

Finance TV folks would have to register as foreign agents. Russia has answered with sanctions

of their own journalists are reacting and to discuss the story we welcome Andrew

Roth reporter for the Washington Post in Moscow. Andrew, welcome. How are you? Good. How are you?

Very good. Thank you. So is this the first time the US government has done something like this in recent memory?

No, I mean, you know, there are a couple of the news agencies that are listed under under the

legislation. I think NHK from Japan, China daily, but I could be wrong about the name as well. I mean,

this happens. It's somewhat rare. The legislation was actually, you know, thought up in 1938 to oppose

any kind of sort of Nazi supported groups from pushing propaganda in the state. Now this is the way

things are interpreted today. Interesting. So that's the origin and that makes perfectly good sense. And

then it's all about where do you draw the line between a legitimate news organization and some foreign

groups that's trying to just push their propaganda on us? Sure. It is an interesting distinction. Was there

anything specifically cited by the US in passing the measure they passed? You know, in particular, they were looking at the 2016

election pretty much for the bonus in pension between the US and Russia over the past year. So that's kind of

working in toy and to every element of the relationship between two countries. So this is sort of just the latest

setting for the two countries to kind of square off the US is angry that they feel that our key spreading propaganda in the United States.

And it shows you afforded to classify itself as a foreign agent. It doesn't close or prevent them from broadcasting,

but it is sort of unpleasant distinction for the company and they had to release some information. And now Russia is

doing the same. Yeah, sometimes international relations are full of complexity and subtlety. And sometimes they

remind me of two angry eight year olds. In this case, the Russians responded to the American maneuver how?

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