Officers of Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) have started searching the Kyiv office of the Kremlin propagandist news agency RIA-Novosti, SBU spokesperson Olena Hitlianska wrote on her Facebook on May 15.
Hitlianska added that the SBU has “strong evidence” backing its decision to conduct the searches.
According to information posted on RIA-Novosti website, a group of people in uniforms with the SBU insignia arrived in the building where the agency has an office and rang the doorbell. After that, contact with a journalist of RIA-Novosti who was present there was lost.
RIA-Novosti also reported that the SBU officers detained one of their journalists, Kiril Vyshynsky, on the street by his house in Kyiv.
Hitlianska earlier said that SBU had uncovered “a network of media companies controlled by the Russian Federation.”
“Law enforcers found out that they were used by an aggressor state as a part of the information war against Ukraine,” she added on her Facebook, without giving more details.
RIA-Novosti, which used to be an international Russian government news agency, has since 2013 gradually turned into one of the most strident voices of Russian propaganda.
In December 2013 RIA-Novosti was officially liquidated and merged into the Rossiya Segodnya agency, which is headed by the infamous pro-Kremlin propagandist Dmitry Kiselev.
However, in Ukraine, it still operates under RIA-Novosti brand and it continued working even after Russia launched its war on Ukraine in 2014.
Kiselev, who has been banned from traveling to Ukraine since October 2014, has called on Ukraine’s authorities to immediately release Vyshynsky.
His call was echoed by a post on Twitter by Margarita Simonyan, the head of the international branch of Russia Today, or RT, who called the searches Kyiv’s “revenge for the Crimean bridge” (the bridge from Russia over the Kerch Strait to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory of Crimean), which is supposed to be opened later on May 15.
Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the Kremlin could take “reciprocal measures” in response to SBU’s actions.
