Estonia's pressure on the Sputnik news agency's branch in the country has nothing to do with freedom of the press and is instead aimed at protecting Europe, the country's Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu told Sputnik on Thursday
NEW DELHI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th January, 2020) Estonia's pressure on the Sputnik news agency's branch in the country has nothing to do with freedom of the press and is instead aimed at protecting Europe, the country's Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu told Sputnik on Thursday.
On October 18, the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, which Sputnik is a part of, said that the employees of Sputnik Estonia had received letters from the Baltic country's Police and Border Guard board that warned they would face criminal prosecution unless they stopped working for the agency by January 1. The Estonian authorities cited the 2014 EU sanctions against several Russian nationals and companies as grounds for their actions. Rossiya Segodnya has since insisted it was not mentioned in any EU sanctions lists.
"Estonia is implementing European Union sanctions policy, not separately toward Sputnik, but about personal sanctions put on [Rossiya Segodnya head] Dmitry Kiselev, one of advocates Russian aggression against Ukraine. These sanctions were established already five and half years ago. And it's nothing to do with media freedom; it is everything to do with defense valuation, defense of Europe, of people," Reinsalu said on the sidelines of the Raisina Dialogue 2020 forum in India.
On Wednesday, Sputnik Estonia's editor-in-chief, Elena Chernysheva, told the Estonian ETV+ channel that Rossiya Segodnya was not owned by Kiselev, invalidating use of EU sanctions as a pretext for censorship.
