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Ukrainian parliament votes to create Ukraine Tomorrow TV broadcaster

The state-run foreign broadcasting company Ukraine Tomorrow will provide "crucial and full information about events in Ukraine to foreign audiences and also Ukrainians in other countries"
Ukrainian parliament  AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
Ukrainian parliament
© AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

KIEV, December 7. /TASS/. The Ukrainian parliament has supported the idea of creating a foreign broadcasting company Ukraine Tomorrow by a 282 majority vote (the required minimum support is 226 votes).

According to the explanatory note, the state-run foreign broadcasting company Ukraine Tomorrow will provide "crucial and full information about events in Ukraine to foreign audiences and also Ukrainians in other countries."

The idea of a foreign broadcasting channel was discussed back in the spring of 2015. Information Policies Minster Yuri Stets then unveiled plans for creating the Ukraine Tomorrow TV channel. The Cabinet of Ministers made a decision to use the TV channel of the National Bank of Ukraine for this purpose. However, in August Stets acknowledged that his ministry had missed the chance of having the channel registered, because Dmitry Firtash’s company had already registered the brand name in various languages by that time. He hurried to promise, though, that the plans for foreign broadcasting remained unaffected and the channel would be given a different name.

At a meeting of the Ukrainian government on September 30 Stets said that a foreign broadcasting platform would be up and running in Ukraine as of October 1. By and large it will operate on the basis of the government-run agency Ukrinform. Before 1990 the agency was an affiliate of TASS. It has nine foreign bureaus. Ukrinform does not have its own TV signal, which is a hindrance to creating a TV channel on its basis.

Nevertheless, Stets has said more than once that Ukraine Tomorrow will be broadcasting in English, Ukrainian and Russian. Some of its programs will be in the language spoken by the Crimean Tatars.