CHISINAU, April 24. /ITAR-TASS/. Moldova's Coordination Council for Television and Radio /KSTR/ said the results of the check of Russian television channels will be available within two months.
The monitoring began last week at the demand of Ana Gutu, a lawmaker from the pro-Rumanian Liberal Party. She called for stopping the broadcasting of the Russian channels in order to secure the country's information security in connection with events in the neighboring Ukraine.
Gutu also suggested replacing Russian news and political programmes with European and Moldovan ones.
Meanwhile, the Coordination Council said it could not ban the channels without preliminary monitoring. "We'll carry it out and announce the results within two months," KSTR said in a press release on Wednesday.
It named the Moldovan channels broadcasting Russia’s First Channel, Russia 1, Russia 24, NTV and Ren-TV. They are most popular in Moldova where 90 percent of the population speak Russian.
KSTR member Yuri Kolesnik said "international experts - representatives of the USA, the European Union, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation with Europe and other organizations - will be invited to take part in the check."
He denied the earlier reports by local and foreign media that Moldova had already banned the broadcasting of Russian channels.
Last year, KSTR warned Moldova's TV-7 for showing a Russian documentary tilted "Transdniestria: Russian Outpost" under the pretext that the film on the situation in the self-proclaimed republic threatened Moldova's territorial integrity.