Baltic countries mull TV channel to counter Kremlin propaganda
Move aimed at curtailing agitation among Russian-speakers
PALDISKI, Estonia — The Russian news broadcast takes broadsides at Ukraine, trumpeting claims that Ukrainian democracy has degenerated into fist fights between right-wing nationalists in Parliament.
Aleksander Danilov isn’t watching the show in Vladimir Putin’s Russian heartland. He’s in Estonia, an EU country where there increasingly are fears that Russia may turn its sights next to the Baltic states after grabbing a chunk of Ukraine.
Danilov can choose from at least a dozen Russian TV channels via cable — and scores more if he could afford a satellite dish. Like many other ethnic Russians across the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 55-year-old retiree doesn’t speak the local language and prefers watching broadcasts from Moscow to thes mattering of news shows and programs provided in Russian by national Baltic broadcasters.
The three Baltic nations watched with alarm as Russia took over Crimea and mobilized its military along Ukraine’s eastern border, pledging to protect all Russians abroad.
Now the Baltics are moving to curtail Moscow’s influence through the airwaves, heedful of the need to prevent pro-Kremlin agitation among the million Russian speakers who stayed after the Baltics regained independence following the Soviet collapse.
Latvia and Lithuania have temporarily banned some pro-Russian TV stations, including Moscow-based RTR Rossiya and RTR Planeta. They are now planning with Estonia to set up a joint Russian-language channel to counter Russian propaganda, hoping for financial assistance from the European Union.
Estonian Education Minister Jevgeni Ossinovski, of ethnic Russian background, said the project is “a matter of national priority” in a nation where Russian speakers make up around 28 per cent of the 1.3 million population.
“It’s a full-scale information war. The facts are portrayed in the way that Russia’s administration wants to,” Ossinovski said in an interview with The Associated Press. “In the end, it’s a strictly national question how we build up communication with our own people in our countries.”
Ivars Belte, a Latvian state TV chief described as the mastermind of the plan, says a joint Baltic channel would be preferable to three separate channels to save costs and could be operational next year or in 2016.
Although dissenting Russians have tuned to online sources for alternative viewpoints, television remains a powerful opinion-shaping tool in Russia, where less than half the adult population uses the Internet daily. The same is true among Russian-speakers in the Baltic countries, where TV remains a main source of news.