Ukraine bans Russian news agency

Ukraine banned Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency on Thursday, a week after detaining one of its journalists in Kiev and accusing him of treason. This decision was not linked to the investigation of RIA's activities in Ukraine, but was part of a new wave of sanctions against the Russian Federation. According to the new sanctions list of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine (NSDC), the RIA Novosti office as well as the Interselekt company which carried out all the agency's economic activities in Kiev are banned for three years.
Sanctions include the blocking of assets, limiting or stopping the provision of telecommunications services, and blocking access to the website www.rian.com.ua. Russia has already condemned the new "attack" on its state media, saying that it is "yet another act of political censorship". "We are outraged by the decision of the Ukrainian authorities to include the Russia Today agency and RIA Novosti agency in Ukraine in the updated sanctions list," foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
The director of Russia Today, the parent company of RIA Novosti, said the new sanctions were "an indicator of impotence" of the current Ukrainian "regime". "It has nothing left to do, but to pursue its own citizens, to persecute journalists, to pursue freedom of speech, to ban respected media," Dmitry Kiselev was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti. On May 15, Ukraine's SBU security service raided the Kiev offices of RIA Novosti, saying the agency and its journalists had been "used as tools in a hybrid war against Ukraine".
The same day RIA Novosti journalist Kyrylo Vyshynsky, a Ukrainian national who received a Russian passport in 2015, was detained near his house in Kiev and accused of treason. On May 17, a Ukrainian court ruled Vyshynsky should be held in detention until his trial. The SBU accused Vyshynsky of travelling to Crimea in 2014 to carry out "subversive" reporting to justify the peninsula's annexation by Russia.