Sputnik international news agency and radio stand. File photoMOSCOW, June 23Vera Yurova, Vice-President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, said that the sanctions against RT, Sputnik and three other Russian TV channels are a temporary measure.
"We decided to impose sanctions against Russia Today and Sputnik, we decided to add three more channels to the sanctions list … But this is temporary, we can return (to the issue of lifting sanctions — ed.) after the situation calms down& #34;,” said Yurova at a conference at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
The European Union on March 2 banned the distribution of the signal and content of RT and Sputnik against the backdrop of the Russian operation to demilitarize Ukraine, the decision was published in the EU's official journal. In particular, the following organizations are listed in the annex to the decision: RT — Russia Today English, RT — Russia Today UK, RT — Russia Today Germany, RT — Russia Today France and RT — Russia Today Spanish, as well as Sputnik without specifying details. Also the EU suspended broadcasting on its territory of three state Russian TV channels: Rossiya RTR/RTR Planeta, Rossiya 24 and TV Center — International.Belgium is investigating the use of Sputnik material in a school examRussian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier that Moscow did not expect the West to impose sanctions on journalists, athletes, and cultural figures. The head of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation, Valery Fadeev, sent an appeal to the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Teresa Ribeiro, and urged her to take measures to comply with the norms relating to freedom of the press, due to the harassment of Russian-language publications. The situation with the Russian media in the West in recent years has become everything is more difficult. In November 2016, the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating the need to counter the Russian media, with Sputnik and RT named as the main threats in the document. A number of Western politicians, including US senators and congressmen, as well as the President of France, accused Sputnik and RT of interfering in the elections in the US and France, but did not provide any evidence. Official Russian representatives called such statements unfounded.