The general secretary of the RUJ, Igor Yakovenko, said an official of the Federal Property Management Agency told the union on 15 May that the eviction was based on an order from President Vladimir Putin to accommodate the expansion plans of the state-owned English-language channel, which aims to foster a positive image of Russia abroad.

The RUJ, Russia's largest public organization with more than 100,000 members, said on 17 May that it does not intend to comply with the eviction order, dated 18 April and giving a month's notice to quit, the Novyye Izvestiya daily reported.

The chairman of the union, Vsevolod Bogdanov, told Ekho Moskvy radio: "The discussion was held with our head of administration. He was told: give us part of your premises and we won't have any claims to you and will sign a new [lease] agreement with you.

"However, when our lawyers told them that this building had been paid for by the Union of Journalists of the Soviet Union, and that the union took part in the construction of the building, their official said: forget it, who cares about what had happened back then; give the building to us voluntarily," he said.

The RUJ and Russia Today both occupy offices in the same building in central Moscow. The building is also the headquarters of a state-run news agency, RIA Novosti, which launched Russia Today in 2005. Yakovenko said the union occupied space in the building under a decree issued in the early 1990s by then-President Boris Yeltsin. The union also has offices in the House of Journalists on Nikitskiy Bulvar.

The IFJ gathering of around 1,000 delegates and observers from all over the world opens on 28 May with a special session on the safety of journalists in Russia and the crisis of impunity for those harassing and sometimes killing media workers. The session is due to be addressed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Recent deaths include the shooting last year of investigative journalist Anna Politskaya in the stairwell of her residence and the mysterious death in March of defence correspondent Ivan Safronov, who worked for the business daily Kommersant, in a fall from the window of his Moscow apartment.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in January that 13 Russian journalists had been murdered in contract-style killings since 2000, making the country the third most hostile environment for journalists, after Iraq and Algeria, in the past 15 years.

The Brussels-based IFJ, a leading press freedom body that lobbies on behalf of journalists worldwide, issued a statement on 14 May condemning what it termed the "official harassment of independent media".

The IFJ condemned a police raid on the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the detention of a number of journalists in a separate incident in the town of Samara on 11 May. The raid took place one week before a planned demonstration in Samara by the opposition group Other Russia, led by former world chess champion Garri Kasparov.

 "Police have targeted media for harassment and intimidation," Aidan White, IFJ general secretary said. "It appears to be an attempt to soften up journalists in advance of public protests. We support the strong condemnation of this action issued by our affiliate, the RUJ."

 The Russian media sector has been a battleground between state and non-state actors since the fall of communism in 1991. As international journalists converge on Moscow for their biggest gathering for three years, the spotlight on union rights, media freedom and safety of journalists seems bound to give the Russian authorities an uncomfortable time, media analysts say.

Source: BBC Monitoring (direct transcript)