Next round of EU sanctions target Russia’s pro-war media

Future EU sanctions will hit Russia’s propaganda mouthpieces while exposing the atrocities hidden beneath them.

Famous Russian TV presenters Boris Korchevnikov and Marina Evgenievna Kim, musician Grigory Lepservidze, and authors Dmitry Puchkov, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Sergey Mikheev are among the 144 people on the 144-person draft new EU blacklist, the EU Observer reported.

Additionally, the broadcasting permits of three Russian networks — NTV/NTV Mir, Rossiya 1, and REN TV — will be canceled in EU nations, according to the source.

According to the documents, the identified Russian media posed “a serious and direct threat to the Union’s public order and security” by “gravely misrepresenting and manipulating facts” to support the war against Ukraine and destabilize EU nations.

Following Russia’s bombing of Ukraine’s energy systems at the start of a bitter winter, the EU imposed its ninth round of sanctions. They include scores of minor government officials, MPs, senators, regional governors, low-ranking military commanders, public servants, and the two daughters and a cousin of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.

They also contain economic sanctions, such as a ban on foreign investment in the mining industry of Russia, a restriction on the sale of dual-use technology to 169 Russian firms, and a freezing of the assets of the Credit Bank of Moscow and the Dalnevostochny Bank.

The ninth batch of EU sanctions is added to the last pile of gas price restrictions, oil embargoes, more than 1,200 blacklisted individuals, Putin’s close family, and prominent Russian political, military, and business figures.

The new penalties’ specifics could alter depending on discussions between EU foreign ministers, according to the EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell.

Previous negotiations between EU member states resulted in the release of some big fish, including Russia’s patriarch Kirill and state-owned diamond company Alrosa.

The forthcoming EU sanctions will document some of the crimes that Russia’s media effort both encourages and seeks to hide.

Four commanders of irregular Russian brigades are included on the new blacklists: Viktor Anosov, Denis Gariyev, Yan Petrovskiy, and Stanislav Vorobyev.

Vorobyev served as the leader of the Russian Imperial Movement, which the EU referred to as “a white-supremacist paramilitary organization that is actively fighting in Ukraine on behalf of the Russian government” and “promoting ethnic Russian nationalism while attempting to fuel white-supremacy extremism in the West.”

The new sanctions will also make it known that Russia is kidnapping Ukrainian children as part of its strategy to terrorize and freeze Ukraine. They identified four Russian officials who supported a Kremlin campaign of “illegal transportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and their adoption by Russian families,” according to the EU documents.

These officials were in charge of child safety. The EU said that one of them, Larisa Falkovskaya, the Russian minister of education’s “protection of children’s rights,” personally facilitated the “illegal adoption of more than 2,000 Ukrainian orphans.”