Kirill Vyshinsky, executive director of the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and Sputnik Estonia's editor-in-chief Elena Chernysheva will participate in the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) that is set to take place on January 27-31 in the French city of Strasbourg, the agency said on Monday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2020) Kirill Vyshinsky, executive director of the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and Sputnik Estonia's editor-in-chief Elena Chernysheva will participate in the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) that is set to take place on January 27-31 in the French city of Strasbourg, the agency said on Monday.
Vyshinsky and Chernysheva will draw the delegates' attention to a systematic violation of media freedom in several post-Soviet countries, including Estonia, which threatened Sputnik journalists working there with criminal prosecution.
"We, of course, expect the support of our parliamentarians, because we think that it is not the issue of personalities, not the issue of those journalists belonging to our or some other media organization, editorial staff. Of course, we are fighting for our own, but we also fight for principles. And we want these principles to be defended on all platforms, PACE included," Vyshinsky said.
Vyshinsky, then the head of the RIA Novosti Ukraine online portal, was detained in May 2018 in Kiev on suspicion of supporting the self-proclaimed republics in Donbas and treason. He was freed on September 7, 2019 during a simultaneous release of detained and convicted persons from Russia and Ukraine. Upon coming to Russia he was made executive director of Rossiya Segodnya.
On October 18, 2019, Rossiya Segodnya, 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.
