This time it feels like the end for RT France. It will be “impossible” for the Russian news channel in French to “continue”. [son] Activity under the same conditions as before, ”announced the President and Information Director of RT France Xenia Fedorova on Wednesday, January 18, in an internal letter that we have been able to consult. The information was confirmed to Le Monde by a spokesman for the channel, before telling us that “any public communication of the channel” will be made via Ms. Fedorova’s Twitter account “if necessary”.
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The manager explained that she had received a letter from her bank telling her that “all funds available were on [notre] Accounts are frozen at the request of the Directorate-General of the Treasury”. Without money, RT (formerly Russia Today) will find it impossible to pay the salaries of the hundred employees still in office, as well as the bills of the technical service providers it uses.
Among the employees, one of them reports, we are concerned that by the end of January we will no longer be paid, but will also be permanently unemployed because they have worked in a medium labeled as propaganda. Additional information could be given to them during two CSEs to be announced on Friday and Monday.
targeted
For Xenia Fedorova, this intervention by the Ministry of Finance is the consequence of the ninth package of European sanctions, approved in December, intended to target four Russian channels accused of manipulating information and Russian propaganda. The Kremlin news agency and propaganda organ ANO TV Novosti (subsidiary of RIA Novosti) affected by the decision is the “sole shareholder and parent company” of RT France, Ms. Fedorova recalled in her internal statement. “In application of the hold criterion, the assets of RT France are to be frozen by the actors concerned who ensure the freezing of assets and economic resources,” confirms the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
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With the closure of RT France, if confirmed, “it is probably the end of all the relocated equipment of the RT network in the west” and with it “the desire to internationalize the channel that began in 2010 with the creation of RT America”, says Maxime Audinet, researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School (Irsem). Even though RT still has offices outside of Europe, RT France, which benefited from a budget of 26.7 million in 2021, has actually been the last real newsroom outside Moscow in recent months.
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