Satellites
© Reuters / Michaela Rehle
An attempted radio-electronic attack on Russian television satellites from the territory of Western Ukraine has been recorded by the Ministry of Communications. It comes days after Ukraine blocked Russian TV channels, a move criticized by the OSCE.

The ministry noted that "people who make such decisions" to attack Russian satellites that retransmit TV signals, "should think about the consequences," Ria reports. The ministry did not share any details of the attack.

Earlier this week, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized Kiev's "repressive" move to halt the broadcasting of Russian TV channels after the Ukrainian media watchdog claimed that shutting down TV stations ensured "national security and sovereignty" of Ukraine.

"Banning programming without a legal basis is a form of censorship; national security concerns should not be used at the expense of media freedom," OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatoviฤ‡ said.

More than half of Ukraine's population speaks Russian regularly and one third say it's their native tongue. In Crimea over 90 percent of the population uses Russian on an everyday basis.

On Thursday, a number of Russian state TV channels websites suffered a large cyber-attack partially coming from Ukraine.

Russia's Channel One website was temporarily unavailable due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Meanwhile, Russia-24 TV also said it suffered from a "massive network attack."

According to Itar-Tass, the targeted Russian media have connected attacks to their editorial policy of covering the recent events in Ukraine.