Two major television service providers in Canada, the Bell and Rogers groups, have decided to stop broadcasting the Russian news channel RT (formerly Russia Today), Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Sunday.
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“Since 2014, Russia has been waging a war in Ukraine and an information war is sweeping the world. RT is the propaganda arm of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s regime that spreads disinformation. It doesn’t belong here,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez tweeted.
Regularly accused of contributing to disinformation, RT is in the crosshairs of several Western capitals which accuse it of being the mouthpiece of the Kremlin, all the more since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops.
“Since February 27, RT is no longer available on Bell channels,” a spokeswoman for this Canadian telecommunications giant told AFP.
While “welcoming” Bell’s decision, Rodriguez tweeted that “Rogers will also be removing RT and replacing it with a Ukrainian flag broadcast.”
The Rogers group, Canadian leader in telecommunications, was unreachable immediately to confirm this announcement.
The RT channel remains broadcast in Canada by other secondary channels and the minister, a close friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, indicated on Twitter that he “will say more very soon”.
More and more countries have thus disconnected RT in recent weeks.
On Sunday, the President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen announced that the Russian state media RT and Sputnik would be banned from the European Union, in order to prevent them from spreading their “lies” about the war waged. by Moscow in Ukraine.
Launched in 2005 as “Russia Today”, the Russian state-funded RT has grown with broadcasters and websites in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German and Arabic.