3 BBC journos barred from entering Ukraine

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko has instructed security officials to strike the names of three BBC journalists off the country’s sanctions list, a day after he signed the decree, his spokesman said on Thursday.

Poroshenko late on Wednesday signed the sanctions list barring nearly 400 individuals from entering Ukraine, including long-serving Moscowbased BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg and producer Emma Wells, both British, and Russian cameraman Anton Chicherov.

The decree which was published on the president’s website said the reporters and media executives on the list presented an unspecified ‘threat to national interests, national security, sovereignty or territorial integrity’.

Faced with a barrage of criticism over the ban, Poroshenko backtracked on Thursday. His spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko said Poroshenko asked the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, which was responsible for drafting the list, to take off the names of the BBC staff. Poroshenko announced his decision to the new British ambassador to Ukraine who presented her credentials to him on Thursday, Tsegolko said.

Ukraine’s security council promptly issued a statement saying it ‘has supported the president’s suggestion’ to lift the sanctions from ‘selected European journalists’. The council said it will remove from the list three BBC journalists, two Spanish reporters and a German journalist.

The Spanish pair, Antonio Pampliega and Angel Sastre, disappeared in Syria in July and is believed to have been kidnapped by the Islamic State group.

The German, journalist and author Michael Rutz, said before his name was removed that he had no idea how he got on the list.

“I have never been to Ukraine and don’t have any intention of traveling there in the near future,” he told German news agency dpa.

This is the first sanctions list against Russia and foreign individuals that Kiev has introduced since a conflict broke out in April 2014 in eastern Ukraine.