MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. Moscow will introduce tit-for-tat steps against British media outlets in response to London’s steps against Russian journalists, a high-ranking source in Moscow told TASS on Thursday.
"British handlers are the ones pulling the strings in the Estonian authorities’ persecution of Sputnik. The United Kingdom’s authorities have recently begun taking a number of aggressive steps against Russian media outlets. They forced a Russian special correspondent to leave London, they failed to issue a work visa to a Russian journalist seeking to go to Britain and they are denying access for some Russian correspondents to events, deliberately putting up hurdles to their work," the source said.
"This will be kept in mind so as to introduce tit-for-tat measures in the near future against British media outlets in Russia," the source said.
Tensions flared up around the Sputnik Estonia news outlet this autumn when the branches of foreign banks moved to ban salary transfers to its staff members, as well as tax and office rent transactions. In addition, the owner of Sputnik Estonia’s Tallinn office intends to terminate the lease agreement by the end of February.
Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya news agency, which owns Sputnik, informed earlier that Estonia’s authorities had announced plans to open criminal cases against the outlet’s personnel in the country unless they stopped working for their parent organization by January 1, 2020. Tallinn explained this situation by sanctions, which the staffers could face after Rossiya Segodnya Director General Dmitry Kiselev had been blacklisted by the EU.
A source told TASS in late November that the UK had failed to issue visas to some Russian journalists in 2019 without explaining the reasons. The British diplomatic mission in Moscow declined to comment, saying that 99% of applicants in Russia received British visas between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019.