Ukraine bans journalists who ’threaten national interests’ from country | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/ukraine-president-bans-journalists-from-country
President Petro Poroshenko has banned two BBC correspondents from Ukraine along with many Russian journalists and public figures.
The long-serving BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg and producer Emma Wells have been barred from entering the country, according to a list published on the presidential website on Wednesday. The decree says those listed were banned for one year for being a “threat to national interests” or promoting “terrorist activities”.
BBC cameraman Anton Chicherov was also banned, along with Spanish journalists Antonio Pampliega and Ángel Sastre, who went missing, presumed kidnapped, in Syria in July.
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Andrew Roy, the BBC’s foreign editor, said: “This is a shameful attack on media freedom. These sanctions are completely inappropriate and inexplicable measures to take against BBC journalists who are reporting the situation in Ukraine impartially and objectively and we call on the Ukrainian government to remove their names from this list immediately.’
The reason for the BBC correspondents’ ban was not clear, but media coverage of the conflict with the rebels – whom the authorities and local media often call “terrorists” – has been a sensitive subject.
Russian television has covered the Ukrainian crisis in a negative light, frequently referring to the new Kiev government as a “fascist junta”, while international media has focused on civilian casualties and the use of cluster munitions in populated areas by both sides.