When suing the Russian news media for defamation, it helps to be a billion-dollar state-owned oil company, instead of a blacklisted nonprofit group. That’s the lesson Nadezhda Kutepova learned this week, after an appellate court in Moscow upheld a rejection of her organization’s lawsuit against a major news company.

In the late 1990s, Kutepova founded Planeta Nadezhd (Hope Planet) in Ozyorsk, a town built around the Mayak nuclear power plant. The Russian government classifies this settlement as a strategic site and it’s accordingly closed to visitors.

In 1957, one of the storage facilities in Ozyorsk exploded and radioactive materials poisoned the area around it, including the River Techa. Planeta Nadezhd spent years lobbying to get medical treatment and benefits for locals affected by the accident.

For its trouble, Planeta Nadezhd was rewarded in April 2015 by being blacklisted as a “foreign agent” by Russia’s Justice Ministry, on the grounds that the organization accepted foreign funding and carried out political activities. A month later, it was fined 300,000 rubles ($5,000) for failing to register with the government’s list of foreign agents.