EU to sanction more Russian-language news outlets

RT
Wed, 15 May 2024 21:10 UTC

© Getty Images / Sefa Karacan

Signs for Russia's international news agency 'RIA Novosti' and 'Rossiya Segodnaya' seen at the 2018 St Petersburg International Economic Forum in St Petersburg, Russia, May 24, 2018

Brussels will add a news agency and two major newspapers to its blacklist

EU ambassadors have agreed to place three Russian news outlets under sanctions, a move that would effectively ban them across the bloc. Moscow has threatened to take "retaliatory measures" against Western journalists in Russia.

The decision affects Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, the newspapers Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Izvestia, and Voice of Europe, a Czech news site accused by officials in Brussels and Prague of spreading pro-Russian "propaganda," EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova announced on Wednesday.

Jourova did not specify what measures would be taken against the outlets, but news organizations already sanctioned by the EU - namely RT and Sputnik - lost broadcasting rights in the EU and had their websites blocked across the union.

Once agreed to by EU foreign ministers, the sanctions will likely come into force as part of the bloc's 14th round of economic penalties on Russia. EU officials hope to agree on the package - which also includes sanctions on Russia's energy sector and export restrictions on goods used by the Russian military - at a summit in late June.

"If these measures are taken against the Russian media...then, despite the fact that Western correspondents will not want to, they will also have to feel our retaliatory measures," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier on Wednesday. "We will respond with lightning speed and extremely painfully for the Westerners," she added.

Comment: The EU bloc is so called, because it blocs both this and that, in the name of protecting freedom, democracy, rule of law, western values, transparency and equality. Cutting up the mental space of Europeans in this way, has a parallel in psychiatry and it is called lobotomy. Sure every analogy has limitations, and this is certainly no exception, but it is still revealing for the state of the EU to read what the the Wiki says on this topic:

A lobotomy (from Greek λοβός (lobos) 'lobe', and τομή (tomē) 'cut, slice') or leucotomy is a discredited form of neurosurgical treatment for psychiatric disorder or neurological disorder (e.g. epilepsy, depression) that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex.^[2] The surgery causes most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, to be severed.

Before it is too late, here are some links to these probably soon to be off-limits pages for EU citizens:

RIA Novosti
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
Izvestia
Voice of Europe
Previously sanctioned was Sputnik and RT.
The way these rules are administered probably vary, but as the saying goes, let sleeping dogs lie. In other words if you live in an EU country and can access blocked pages, don't tell.