Annexed Crimea moves to crush independent media

Source: http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1395355952

Human Rights in Ukraine
Information website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

The website E-Crimea reports that the “State Council of the Crimea”, as the self-proclaimed government is apparently calling itself, has announced its intention to close media which receive grants from other countries.

Grigory Ioffe, deputy speaker of the Crimean parliament told Russian officials that they would be launching a campaign to remove “grantoyedy”, people, in his view, working for the sake of grants from the media in the Crimea.  He expressed the view that there were many such grant-receivers with “developed telecommunications and printed media”.  “I know that in Russia you dealt with them in time and therefore I think that we will also have to do a lot in that direction. And during our serious work which ended the day before yesterday (when Putin announced the effective annexation of the Crimea – translator), these media of course misled Crimeans and did their bad work. I think that Russian legislation will help us greatly in this.”

As reported, most Ukrainian television channels were removed from air soon after the armed invasion and installation of Sergei Aksenov’s puppet government.  Which media over recent months, and in fact years, have been most active in disseminating false information and stirring up enmity between different ethnic groups is highly debatable.

Russia does indeed have all too much experience of imposing measures against what it calls “foreign agents”, i.e civic organizations which receive grants from abroad.  It has not thus far attacked media sources, though a bill was recently tabled in the Russian State Duma.

Photo – crimeavector.com.ua