BELGRADE, April 3. /TASS/. The popular Serbian website Vostok.rs, whose Facebook page was recently blocked following a publication marking NATO’s aggression in 1999, will not amend its editorial policy and will continue to publish relevant materials, Vostok’s chief editor Vanja Savicevic told TASS Friday.
"The Vostok website continues to work as before, with the same editorial policy. We will undoubtedly continue to publish materials about the 21st anniversary of NATO’s aggression against Serbia. I would like to underscore that our website has never engaged in clickbait, shocking headlines or scandalous texts. All our articles and headlines correspond to the ongoing events and facts. We have never published any fake news whatsoever and we are not going to do it in the future," Savicevic emphasized.
The chief editor noted that this was not the first time a website in Serbia that does not tout the West’s narrative has been blocked.
"The fact is that our website was blocked after an article marking the anniversary of NATO’s aggression, just as [Russian] Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted. In this regard, we thank the Russian Foreign Ministry and Maria Zakharova, who pointed out the issue of censorship on social media in general and of censorship against Vostok in particular," Savicevic noted. "We thank our colleagues from the TASS news agency and other media partners, as well as our readers for their support. I would also like to thank Counter Admiral Bosko Antic, whose stories on our website have become a part of the blocked content."
Earlier, Zakharova castigated Facebook’s ban of Vostok’s account as a case of political censorship with an anti-Russian connotation. On the same day, April 2, the account was unblocked, and some 100,000 posts, deleted during the block, were restored.
Vostok’s Facebook account has roughly 80,000 subscribers, while the website itself serves an audience of more than 350,000 monthly viewers.
For 11 years, Vostok has positioned itself as "the first Serbian-language website with news from Russian sources without intermediaries." It specializes in translation of news from Russian-language news agencies and TV channels, publishing several dozens to several hundreds of news items every day. The bulk of the website’s publications consist of news and videos from Russia’s RT Channel.
In August 2019, the website was attacked by unidentified hackers, who demanded that the website change its editorial policy and halt its activity. In 2017, the North Atlantic Council included Vostok into a list of "Kremlin propaganda" website in Serbia, despite Vostok being a private Serbian project.
NATO Aggression
March 24, 1999, marked the beginning of NATO’s military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The NATO command claimed that it was "preventing the genocide of the Albanian population in Kosovo" as the main justification for the bloc’s air offensive. According to NATO’s data, during the operation that lasted 78 days, its aviation conducted 38,000 sorties, and more than 10,000 of those were conducted for bombings.