KIEV, June 3. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has described as a big mistake the publication of journalists’ personal data on the Ukrainian website Peacekeeper for obtaining accreditation in the self-proclaimed republics in Donbass.
"Firstly, I strongly condemn the publication of personal data of more than 2,000 journalists on the Peacekeeper website. Secondly, I have evidence that some of those journalists were working on materials containing negative comments and articles on Ukraine," he told a news conference in Kiev.
Poroshenko said Peacekeeper was an independent Internet resource and remarked there were no legal instruments available to close it down. He acknowledged that Ukraine lacked an effective machinery of letting journalists who had entered Ukraine legally to travel to certain areas of Donbass.
"Foreign journalists should not be under threat in Ukrainian territory. At the same time, if we are to talk about Russian journalists, some of them have committed crimes and it will be a subject matter of a separate investigation," Poroshenko said.
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At the beginning of May Peacekeeper published the personal data of nearly five thousand journalists, including those representing TASS, the BBC, Reuters, France Presse, CNN, Bloomberg, Al-Jazeera, Associated Press, the dailies, The Independent and La Liberacion and other mass media. The publication sparked public outcry to pause the operation of the resource for a while.
The website’s administration on May 24, acting in defiance of protests from the world public community, published another list of mass media employees, who had been accredited in the self-proclaimed republics of Donbass. The lists contain personal information about nearly 300 journalists, including their home and email addresses and telephone numbers. Most of them - 293 - are employees of foreign mass media from Austria, Germany, Georgia, Brazil, and Iraq (59 countries all in all). This time there was not a single Russian name on the list. The European Union has urged the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies to delete the published list and conduct proper investigation.