Anonymous, a decentralised international hacktivist group, has claimed responsibility for the cyberattacks that ravaged news agencies as well as the official website of the Kremlin. 

Websites news agencies and newspapers such as TASS, Kommersant, Izvestia, Fontanka, Forbes, and RBK all showed messages condemning the action of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin forces you to lie and puts you in danger. Why do we need it? So that Putin was added to textbooks? This is not our war, let’s stop him!” the messages (as translated) read.

“This statement will be removed, and some of us will be fired or even jailed. But we cannot stand it anymore,” added the protest message from Anonymous.

On Friday, the official website of the Kremlin was down, five Russian government websites also experienced downtime for several hours same day, with the hacker group also claiming responsibility for those cyberattacks. 

“Anonymous has ongoing operations to keep .ru government websites offline, and to push information to the Russian people so they can be free of Putin’s state censorship machine,” the group tweeted on Friday.

Adding that “We also have ongoing operations to keep the Ukrainian people online as best we can.”

Russian authorities have denied that the group is behind the cyberattacks, which began as Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

On Thursday, the group announced that it had taken down the Russian state-controlled television network RT News.

RT confirmed that a denial-of-service (DDos) attack had slowed or taken offline several state websites but did not confirm if Anonymous was behind the attack.