Latvia bans Russian channel

Latvia on Thursday slapped a three-month ban on the Moscow-based TV channel Rossiya RTR for alleged hate speech and warmongering.

“Rossiya RTR is a Kremlin-owned propaganda channel carrying explicit and implicit hate speech and warmongering… This will not be tolerated in Latvia,” Ivars Abolins, deputy chair of Latvia’s National Electronic Media Council (NEPLP), told AFP.

An NEPLP statement said that no digital, terrestrial or cable TV provider is allowed to carry the Rossiya RTR channel on the Latvian market for the next three months.

Abolins cited current affairs talk show host Vladimir Solovyov, who he said “explicitly and repeatedly used hate speech against several groups of Ukraine’s citizens, saying that they should be ‘hanged and shot dead’ for their political beliefs.”

The NEPLP also slammed the station’s “60 Minutes” current affairs programme for airing statements by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultra-nationalist deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma.

Zhirinovsky has said Ukrainians do not have the right to their own state and has made repeated calls for Russia to attack the country militarily.

“It’s not even important which country or nation, or group of people are targeted in hate speech: any hate speech is illegal,” NEPLP member Patriks Griva told AFP.


The media watchdog has also asked regulatory authorities in Sweden, where Rossiya RTR is registered for broadcast to all European markets, to block the Russian station’s broadcasts to Latvia.

Ukraine and the West have repeatedly accused Moscow of waging an “information war” to justify its backing of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its meddling in eastern Ukraine have triggered concern in Latvia and fellow Baltic EU member states Estonia and Lithuania, which emerged from nearly five decades of Soviet occupation in the early 1990s.

Latvia banned Rossiya RTR for three months in April 2016 for alleged “misleading, biased and warmongering information”.

Lithuania also imposed a similar ban a year earlier.
https://www.expatica.com/ru/latvia-b...d-hate-speech/