This week Russia’s media regulator and telecom oversight agency, known as Roskomnadzor, reminded Russian citizens that it’s illegal to post memes of real people that depict them in any way that does not reflect their “personality,” the Washington Post reported. The announcement, made on Russian social media site VKontakte, clarified an existing law governing how a person’s image may be distributed.

Further Reading New Russian law represses social media, bloggers

"These ways of using [celebrities’ images] violate the laws governing personal data and harm the honor, dignity and business of public figures,” Roskomnadzor wrote, according to a translation from the Post. Parody accounts and parody websites impersonating a person are also illegal.

Roskomnadzor has only been an entity in Russian public policy for three years and it has already defined itself as a repressive and controlling speech censor. In 2012, it was ordered to create a blacklist of websites detrimental to Russian interests and ended up blocking over 180 sites. In mid-2014, Russia passed a law that said bloggers with 3,000 daily readers or more must register with Roskomnadzor. The same law also required that social media data be stored within Russia’s boundaries so the government can access it at any time.

This recent clarification on meme law was ordered by a Moscow judge, who presided over a case involving Russian singer Valeri Syutkin. Syutkin sued a Russian culture site for disseminating some off-color jokes using his image, and the judge ruled in his favor, but asked that Roskomnadzor post an update to its laws governing personal data.

A person who believes that their image is being used inappropriately can report the offenders to Roskomnadzor or sue them. "Web sites are essentially given the choice of blocking the offending content in Russia, or seeing their whole sites get blocked across the country,” the Post writes.

The Post added that celebrities will likely have to report the memes themselves, which could mean that some could still be used if they’re not reported. One hopes that Vladimir Putin is too busy to scour the Internet seeking to destroy for the many excellent memes using his visage. (But of course he probably delegates that job to someone else.)

Naturally, after hearing of this news, we turned to the Internet to find the best Putin memes the free world can offer: