(Moscow) Russia on Thursday ordered the closure of the local office of the German international radio and television station Deutsche Welle and banned its programs, in retaliation for the ban on the Russian channel RT from broadcasting in Germany.
Posted at 9:51 a.m.
This closure announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry is a first for a major Western media outlet in the country’s post-Soviet history. It also intervenes in the midst of a crisis between Moscow and the West over Ukraine, which fears a Russian invasion.
For the past thirty years, the Kremlin has been careful not to attack foreign media, while the Russian media sector has been brought to heel since Vladimir Putin took over the country in 2000.
Expulsions of journalists
In recent years, as relations with Westerners have worsened, this policy has changed with the expulsion of a BBC journalist and a Dutch reporter in 2021.
The “retaliatory measures” announced by Moscow on Thursday involve the “closure of the local office” of Deutsche Welle, the “withdrawal of the accreditation of all employees” from this office and the “discontinuation of the broadcast” of this media on Russian territory.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also announced the launch of a procedure aimed at recognizing Deutsche Welle as a “foreign agent”, an infamous and controversial qualifier already applied to several Russian media critics of the power.
According to Moscow, sanctions are also planned against the “representatives of German state and public structures involved in the restriction of the broadcasting of RT”, a channel which promotes in particular the position of the Kremlin abroad.
The Russian authorities clarified that these measures were a “first step”, promising an additional response “in due course”.
YouTube in the sights of the Kremlin
A few hours earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had blasted the German regulator’s ban on RT as an “attack on freedom of expression”.
On Wednesday, Moscow also promised punishment for online platforms that “arbitrarily and unjustifiably deleted the channel’s accounts”, an apparent reference to the American giant YouTube, which on December 16 suspended the German language account of RT on the day of its commissioning.
The satellite broadcast of the channel in Germany was interrupted shortly after at the request of the authorities.
On Wednesday, German regulator ZAK banned the broadcast of RT Deutsch on its website and mobile app, arguing that “necessary permission” was “neither requested nor granted”.
Moscow believes that this decision is in fact “motivated by political considerations”.
Navalny and assassination in Berlin
Russia and Germany have seen their relations deteriorate in recent years, Berlin having notably established that the opponent Alexei Navalny had been poisoned and condemned an agent of the Russian services who carried out a controlled assassination in the German capital.
The delays in the commissioning of the gas pipeline between the two countries, Nord Stream 2, is another point angering Moscow.
The crisis around RT and Deutsche Welle also comes in the context of Russian-Western tensions around Ukraine.
The RT channel, inaugurated in 2005 under the name of “Russia Today”, is financed by the Russian State. It has developed into several languages including English, French, Spanish, German and Arabic.
Kremlin disinformation tool
RT has sparked controversy in several countries, including the United States, where she is registered as a “foreign agent”, and in Britain, where authorities have threatened to strip her of her broadcasting license. The channel has been banned in several countries, including Lithuania and Latvia.
In France, RT is widely accused by authorities of being a Kremlin disinformation tool.
RT Germany had first tried, via its holding company, to register in Luxembourg, without success. Then it fell back on a license that the group has in Serbia, an approach that the German regulator does not recognize.
Arguing from the European Convention on Television, of which Berlin is a signatory, Moscow believes for its part that this Serbian license for cable and satellite transmission should be sufficient for RT.