Russia announced on Thursday that it is ending operations of German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in Moscow and withdrawing accreditation from its staff in a retaliatory measure for the banning of Russian broadcaster RT DE from Germany.
Moscow said it would stop broadcasting the German channel in Russia and start a process that would declare it a “foreign agent”, a designation that carries a negative Soviet-era connotation.
Russia’s foreign ministry also said it would prevent German officials involved in the measure banning RT DE from entering Russia.
Germany’s foreign ministry said Moscow’s measures “have no basis whatsoever and represent renewed tension in German-Russian relations”.
“We firmly reject the comparison between Deutsche Welle and broadcaster RT DE,” a ministry spokesman said in a statement.
Germany’s media watchdog MABB and the Commission for Licensing and Supervision (ZAK) of media institutions said this week that RT DE could not broadcast in Germany using a Serbian license, a decision that angered Russia.
In a statement on its website detailing its retaliatory measures, the Russian Foreign Ministry described the German action as “hostile”.
The dispute comes amid broader tensions with the West over Ukraine, which are an early test of political relations between Berlin and Moscow after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took office in December.
The Kremlin said on Thursday that a trip by Scholz to Moscow was on the agenda, but that a date had not yet been confirmed.
German state-funded Deutsche Welle said it had formally protested the measure and would take legal action. “We are becoming a pawn here in a way that the media only has to experience in autocracies,” the news agency’s director Peter Limbourg said in a statement.
Hendrik Wuest, prime minister of the state of North Rhine Westphalia, where Deutsche Welle is headquartered, called Russia’s action “a massive and deliberate attack on press freedom, which we strongly condemn”.
The German journalists association DJV has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to immediately lift the ban on Deutsche Welle. “There is no justification for this drastic measure of censorship,” DJV President Frank Ueberall said in a statement.
The announcement in Deutsche Welle comes amid a crackdown on media that Russia considers “foreign agents”. The country uses the term to designate foreign-funded organizations that would be engaged in political activities.
Source: CNN Brasil
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