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Restrictions on Russian media in Ukraine may bring up adverse reaction in society

KIEV, March 6. /TASS/. Restrictions on professional activity of Russian mass media in Ukraine may have an entirely opposite effect, Dr. Ruslan Bortnik, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of Analysis and Management in Politics said on Thursday answering a question by TASS.

"A ban on the operations of Russia media in what concerns the annulling of their accreditations at the agencies of state power is an emotional and political prohibition that caters to the moods of radical sections of society but it may produce a totally opposite reaction among the majority of the country’s population," Dr. Bortnik believes.

"This ban has already produced a derogatory reaction on the part of the (European security organization) OSCE and it doesn’t have any formal grounds, since Ukraine and Russia are not in the formal state of war and whatever guilt of the Russian media hasn’t been proven because there are no judiciary rulings on the issue," he said.

Earlier on Thursday, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry stopped accrediting the Russian correspondents for its conferences.

"We don’t give accreditations to the Russian media (for the Foreign Ministry’s events - TASS) as of this week," the ministerial press service told TASS when a correspondent asked it why he had been denied an accreditation for a news conference given jointly by the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Pavel Klimkin, and British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond.

On February 12, 2015, the Verkhovna Rada, the national parliament suspended the accreditation of a number of Russian media at the Ukrainian agencies of state power. It ordered the State Security Service SBU to compile a list of the media, which placed on it more than a hundred Russian media.

Following an "examination of contents" the SBU filled the list with Russian TV channels, news agencies, publications and Internet resources registered in Russia.

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