Crimea’s only independent TV news channel, ATR, has been forced to stop broadcasting after the new authorities rejected its attempts to register for a licence.

ATR is also the only channel that broadcasts in the language of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic minority that opposed Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March 2014. Sixty per cent of the channel’s content was in Russian, 35% in Crimean Tatar and 5% in Ukrainian.

Although the official reason the channel wasn’t registered was mistakes in its paperwork, ATR’s director, Shevket Memetov, tied the forced closure to the channel’s occasionally critical coverage of life under Russian rule. Crimean Tatars have faced disappearances and police searches under the new government.

“We showed and talked about everything like it is. We talked about problems as they are,” Memetov told the Guardian. He said freedom of speech had been stifled by the new authorities.

After the annexation of Crimea, local media outlets were required to register with the federal communications agency before 1 April 2015. ATR submitted registration documents three times, but the agency rejected them because of supposed mistakes in the paperwork, Memetov said. Its fourth attempt has not received a response, and the channel had to stop broadcasting at a minute after midnight on Wednesday. The state-owned channel Pervy Krymsky is now the only local television broadcaster covering news.

The children’s channel Lale and the radio stations Meidan FM and Leader, which are part of the ATR media holding, also ceased activities. The news site 15minut.org is still online, as the holding’s leadership tries to determine whether regulations will allow it to keep working.

The prime minister of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, claimed at a press conference in March that the alleged mistakes in ATR’s documents were likely to have been “made deliberately to inflame the political situation”. But his comments also seemed to suggest that the channel may have been denied registration due to its critical stance.

“At the same time, defending Ukraine’s interests on the territory of Crimea today is pointless and unnecessary,” Aksyonov said. “There’s no need to stir up the population with the thought that Crimea will become part of Ukraine again someday.”

Although ATR is not a 24-hour news channel, it has unflinchingly covered many of the problems that have arisen since Crimea joined Russia, including interruptions of utilities and food supplies, huge lines at the ferry crossing to Russia and the second-highest inflation rate in the world. In December, the United States and the European Union placed an economic embargo on Crimea.

According to Memetov, Crimea’s internal politics, information and communications ministry has been monitoring the channel’s coverage, instructing it to ignore negative issues and to show more of the republic’s new Moscow-backed leadership. The owner of the ATR holding, Lenur Ilsyamov, told journalists that the authorities had tried to buy the channel, threatening to “take it by force” otherwise.

Russian law places a variety of restrictions on the channel’s coverage, he added, essentially forbidding it from showing the Crimean Tatars’ two most important political leaders. Refat Chubarov, the head of the Tatar parliament, was banned from Crimea in July while on a trip to mainland Ukraine to meet his predecessor, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who had been banned in April. Russia’s government newspaper said Chubarov was forbidden from entering Crimea due to “signs of extremism” in a speech he gave on the Tatars’ right to self-determination.

Law enforcement officials have searched the homes of Crimean Tatars, who make up 13% of the population, for “extremist” literature in recent months. Several Tatar activists have also been arrested on charges that the Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights has called unsubstantiated.

According to the mission’s report in February, nine people have gone missing since the annexation, including Crimean Tatar activists and ethnic Ukrainians. Several of them were reported to have been abducted.

Memetov said the channel was not planning to move to Ukraine and was looking into ways to continue its activities.