Russia has told a BBC journalist working in Moscow to leave the country by the end of this month in retaliation for what it called London’s discrimination against Russian journalists working in Britain, state TV reported late on Thursday.

In an unusual move, the Rossiya-24 TV channel said that Sarah Rainsford, one of the BBC’s two English-language Moscow correspondents, would be going home in what it called “a landmark deportation”.

The step, a de facto expulsion, follows a crackdown before parliamentary elections in September on Russian-language media at home.