Kiev: Ukraine Thursday banned Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency, a week after one of its journalists was detained in Kiev and accused of treason.
According to the new sanctions list of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC), the RIA Novosti office as well as the Interselekt company which carried out all the agency’s economic activities in Kiev are banned for three years.
Sanctions include the blocking of assets, limiting or stopping the provision of telecommunications services, and blocking access to the website www.rian.com.ua.
The director of the public media conglomerate Rossiya Segodnya, parent company of RIA Novosti, said the new sanctions were “an indicator of impotence” of the current Ukrainian “regime”.
“It has nothing left to do, but to pursue its own citizens, to persecute journalists, to pursue freedom of speech, to ban respected media,” Dmitry Kiselev was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti.
May 15, Ukraine’s SBU security service raided the Kiev offices of RIA Novosti, saying the agency and its journalists had been “used as tools in a hybrid war against Ukraine”.
The same day RIA Novosti journalist Kyrylo Vyshynsky, a Ukrainian national who received a Russian passport in 2015, was detained near his house in Kiev and accused of treason.
May 17, Ukrainian court ruled Vyshynsky should be held in detention until his trial.
The SBU accused Vyshynsky of travelling to Crimea in 2014 to carry out “subversive” reporting to justify the peninsula’s annexation by Russia. The 51-year-old was also accused of collaborating with Russian-backed separatist groups in eastern Ukraine where a conflict that broke out following Crimea’s seizure has cost some 10,000 lives.
