MOSCOW, May 30 (RIA Novosti) – Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) has barred a reporter of Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper who covered the anti-federalist crackdown in southeastern Ukraine from entering the country for five years.
“That awkward feeling when you learn you’ve been banned from entering Ukraine for five years,” Alexander Kots, Pravda’s special correspondent in Ukraine’s Donbass region, said on his Twitter page.
He said Ukrainian border guards had sounded apologetic when they showed him the SBU resolution. “The ban ends on May 15, 2019. It's Category D. I don’t know what it means,” he said, adding the paper had come from SBU’s main department.
Kots said the guards made sure he had boarded the next train to Belgorod, a Russian city on the border with Ukraine, and sent him off home.
This is yet another incident in the litany of anti-media action that the Ukraine government has taken against Russian and foreign journalists since the February coup, including entry bans, assaults and abductions.
On Thursday, Reporters Without Borders voiced concern over “serious and dramatic” worsening of working conditions for journalists in Ukraine amid the ongoing strife in the country’s south and east.
It said journalists couldn’t do their job because they are caught between violence and a politicized playground, adding there had been at least 218 registered cases of physical attacks on reporters over the past five months.
Over the past two months, reporters of Russia’s leading channels and newspapers have been kidnapped, beaten, threatened and denied access to Ukraine.
Journalists of Russian news portal LifeNews, Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko, were detained near the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region on May 18 and charged with promoting terrorism. Russian journalists were held captive by Ukrainian forces for almost a week before being released.
Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that unlawful de-facto arrests of journalists by the Ukrainian authorities must stop.
