With the conflict in Ukraine still simmering and relations with the West at their lowest point in decades, Russia is working hard to mold its image in both international and local media. While the government has long consolidated control over the country’s leading television networks, in the last year the Kremlin has taken aggressive steps to rein in Internet media as well.

Prosecutors have blocked the websites of Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent whistle-blower and opposition politician, and other opposition sites, and prominent bloggers are now required to register with the government. RIA Novosti, once seen as a liberal bastion among government news media, was liquidated and reincorporated under the name Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today. The liberal online television channel Dozhd was nearly driven to bankruptcy in what its owners said was a politically motivated attack.

Vedomosti and Forbes Russia provide some of the most critical coverage in the country. In August, Vedomosti broke the news that the country’s oil giant, Rosneft, had asked the government for a $41 billion bailout to help weather sanctions from the West. Forbes Russia has ruffled feathers with a yearly listing of the country’s richest people, the powerful oligarchs, as well as the salaries of managers at some of the government’s largest companies.

Igor I. Sechin, the head of Rosneft and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, successfully sued both Forbes and Vedomosti this summer — Forbes for naming him the country’s highest-paid chief executive officer, with an estimated salary of $50 million, and Vedomosti for suggesting that he had undue power over government decisions.

“Foreign ownership was the only thing that protected some Russian media outlets’ editorial integrity,” said Leonid Bershidsky, the founding editor of Vedomosti and the first publisher of Forbes Russia. “If it’s not allowed, that last bit of protection is gone.”