The apps of Russia Today and Sputnik have been removed from the mobile app store by Google.
The European Union has imposed sanctions on the two Kremlin-lined media outlets.
It is not clear if the Play Store ban on the Russian state-affiliated media entities is limited to the EU or not.
At the request of the government in Ukranian, the RT News app was banned.
We reached out to the company for more information about the Play Store ban and will update this report as we get more.
Apple pulls Russian state-owned media outlets RT and Sputnik from global App Stores
We reported earlier that the EU's legal ban on RT and Sputnik will cover all distribution channels, including online platforms, and provide a hard deadline for platform giants to act against them.
Germany banned the German-language version of the Russian state broadcaster earlier this month, but the incoming pan-EU sanction means there will soon be a blanket ban across the region.
Ahead of the EU's sanction coming into force, Google announced blocks on the channels of Sputnik andRT.
The legal sanction for blocking access to their channels in the EU is not the same as suspending their accounts globally.
The criticism was for only implementing a partial block on Russian propaganda.
Some other platforms have reacted quicker to the Ukraine crisis than Google has.
As a response to the invasion of Ukraine, Apple will remove the Sputnik News app from its App Store in all markets outside of Russia.
Microsoft, meanwhile, had already banned the software from its Windows app store and de-ranked both news sources in its search engine Bing, announcing a package of measures Monday.
Other tech firms have also scrambled to put out restrictions on Russian state-affiliated media in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, with Twitter expanding its labelling policy to flag totweets which contain links to the media outlets, as well as reducing the visibility of the content.
European leaders were not happy that the accounts were not blocked. When the EU sanctions come into effect, the company will likely have to remove certain content from EU member states.
Earlier this week, Facebook and TikTok announced that they were blocking Sputnik andRT in the EU.
Political leaders in Europe and Commission lawmakers have been applying high level pressure to mainstream tech platforms to do more to tackle what the president described Sunday as Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Commission believes that the two Kremlin-linked media entities are a key piece of Putin's war machinery.
As EU says it’ll ban Russia’s ‘toxic media machine’, social media firms face pressure to act
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