Moscow ? When Russia’s president hailed his country’s record on press freedom this week, he omitted the newest, significant exception to the rights of the press: Journalistic freedom here apparently no longer extends to calling President Vladimir V. Putin unflattering names.

The evidence includes prosecutors last month charging the editor of an online newspaper with the criminal offense of “insulting a representative of the state” after referring to Putin as “the nation’s phallic symbol.”

Vladimir Rakhmankov, who could be sentenced to up to a year of hard labor if convicted, made the remark in a satirical article about Putin’s recent public appeal to Russian women to have more children as a way to halt the country’s population decline.

Rakhmankov, whose site, cursiv.ru, has since been shut down by his Internet server, previously irked authorities by accusing the governor of the Ivanovskaya region, northeast of Moscow, of taking bribes.

“I’m absolutely sure it’s retribution,” Rakhmankov said of the charge the prosecutor there filed against him.