The Russian Foreign Ministry published on Thursday a list of countermeasures in response to the ban on the RT DE channel in Germany, which includes the suspension of the signal of the Deutsche Welle channel via satellite and any other means of broadcasting.
Among other measures, the Foreign Ministry announced the closure of the correspondent office of the outlet in Russia, as well as the cancellation of the accreditations of all the employees who work in the channel’s office.
At the same time, it has been proposed to the competent Russian bodies that they initiate the necessary procedures to declare said channel as a “foreign media outlet performing the functions of a foreign agent”.
In addition, Russia promises to draw up a list of German “state and civil society structures” that were implicated in restricting the broadcast of RT DE and in “other pressure on the Russian media operator.” Once the list is made, which will not be made public, the representatives of such entities will be prohibited from entering Russian territory.
Ban RT DE
This Wednesday, the German regulator Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg (MABB) ordered to stop broadcasting the RT DE signal on the Eutelsat satellite, on SmartTV, on the RT News application, on the official RT DE website and on the Odyssey platform, justifying the measure for the alleged lack of the required license.
For its part, the channel itself claimed to have obtained all the documents and announced its decision to appeal the MABB decision in court. Anna Bélkina, deputy editor-in-chief of RT, emphasized that RT DE obtained the license for the broadcast “in accordance with all laws and regulations, including the European Convention on Transfrontier Television”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov regretted the decision of the German authorities, calling it an “attack on freedom of expression.”
The start of RT DE’s broadcasts was hampered by a campaign against it launched by the authorities and some German media. In August 2021, Luxembourg refused to grant RT DE a license for broadcasts, a decision that the European country justified by referring to certain “information and data from the German authorities” that it did not specify.
-In September, YouTube removed two German-language RT channels, RT DE and DFP, accusing them of violating community rules.
-In December, six days after the 24-hour broadcast of the RT channel in German began, the European telecommunications satellite Eutelsat 9B canceled its signal on the platform.
-For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the cancellation of the channel’s signal “arbitrary”, and warned that Russia will respond symmetrically if this situation continues.
