Latvia Blocks Russian Sputnik Site As Kremlin 'Propaganda Tool'
By RFE/RL
Latvian authorities shut down Russia's pro-Kremlin news site Sputnik on March 29, calling it a "propaganda tool" and drawing an immediate rebuke from Moscow.
Latvia's local domain registry suspended Sputnik's right to hold the news site Sputniknews.lv, which was established only a few weeks ago to reach out to Latvia's large Russian-speaking minority with articles in Russian and Latvian.
"We don't regard Sputnik as a credible media source but as something else: a propaganda tool," Latvian Foreign Ministry spokesman Raimonds Jansons told AFP.
Russia's Foreign Ministry called the decision "blatant censorship" and insisted "the Russian mass media adheres to the highest standards of professionalism and ethics."
Riga "once again, with the tacit inaction of leading human rights organizations, is ignoring its convention obligations to ensure media pluralism and freedom of speech as it continues to target Russian mass media in Latvia," the ministry said.
Latvia has banned Russian media before, having shut down Russian state television broadcasts for several months in 2014.
The Russian Embassy in Latvia called the move against Sputnik "groundless" and said that Latvia had started "an information war."
Latvia's domain registry decided to shut the site after receiving a letter of concern from the Latvian Foreign Ministry, which drew attention to Sputnik's coverage of Ukraine and routine denial of the embattled nation's territorial integrity.
The ministry questioned whether the coverage might constitute a breach of European Union sanctions on Russia, which were imposed over Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014.
"We wrote pointing out our opinion that the fact that the head of Sputnik, Mr. [Dmitry] Kiselyov is on the sanctions list of the European Union was something that needed to be taken into account" in deciding whether to register the site, Jansons told AFP.
With reporting by Reuters and AFP
Ukrainian Parties Fail To Form New Governing Coalition
By RFE/RL
Last-minute demands raised by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland party quashed hopes for a new governing coalition in Ukraine on March 29.
The party had been reported on March 28 to be part of an imminent deal to form a new coalition and end the political crisis that has delayed Western-backed reforms and loans.
But Tymoshenko, at a meeting of prospective coalition members, raised new demands, including scrapping a tax on pension payments and rolling back energy price hikes.
The price hikes were a key reform demanded by the International Monetary Fund as part of Ukraine's bailout program.
Lawmakers emerged from the meeting saying the hoped-for coalition was not formed despite an announcement by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's party late on March 28 of an impending new alliance with Fatherland and President Petro Poroshenko's faction in the parliament.
Tymoshenko "is demanding a stack of political laws be voted on before joining the coalition. Everyone has to go back to the drawing board," a source in Poroshenko's bloc told Reuters.
Lawmakers in Yatsenyuk's faction also said the three-party coalition had not been formalized, with party head Maksym Burbak saying the deal won't be finalized until next week.
Mustafa Nayyem, a lawmaker from Poroshenko's bloc, said "Tymoshenko invented new conditions and that's why everything has finally failed."
Fatherland is the smallest party in parliament, but the support of its 19 lawmakers would have been enough to give the three-party coalition a majority when added to the 216 lawmakers from Poroshenko's and Yatsenyuk's factions.
Parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Hroysman, 38, an ally of Poroshenko, was expected to be put forward as a replacement prime minister by the new coalition. But that move also has been thrown into doubt or delayed along with the new coalition.
Lawmakers said the longer the government fails to form a new coalition, the more likely the chaos will trigger snap parliamentary elections, something Poroshenko hopes to avoid as that likely would boost support for populist parties that oppose Western-backed austerity measures.
The lack of a stable coalition capable of pushing reforms through parliament already has derailed talks for a new $1.7 billion loan from the IMF.
With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, Interfax, and TASS
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