This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Belarusian and Russian opposition leaders are launching a Russian-language television channel in Estonia to combat Kremlin propaganda around eastern Europe.

For now, aru.tv is broadcasting three times a week online, but plans to expand its coverage from April, according to its founder, Belarusian activist Pavel Morozov.

It receives support from MyMedia, an initiative to promote independent journalism in Turkey and several former Soviet countries that is funded by the Danish government.

“Aru.tv targets people in Russia and the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, the Baltic States and Belarus,” Morozov told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita. “The people behind this project consider its main mission to be providing information free of propaganda elements.”

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A previous attempt by Morozov to launch aru.tv in 2009 was short-lived. Now the format has changed and will have a more “satirical direction”, he told the Estonian site Rus.err.ee.

The channel’s launch comes as Germany’s state-run broadcaster Deutsche Welle attempts to start a new international news service to counter Russian propaganda.

RT, a Kremlin television channel focused on foreign viewers, has been expanding around the world and has received warnings from British regulators for biased coverage of the Ukraine crisis. Late last year, the Kremlin announced SputnikNews, a radio and internet outlet that will also target foreign audiences.

Aru.tv is run mostly by political emigres. Morozov received political asylum in Estonia after he faced legal trouble in his homeland in 2005 for creating satirical cartoons of strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko, and one of the main hosts is Artemy Troitsky, an acclaimed Russian music critic with outspoken views against Vladimir Putin’s government who has also relocated to Tallinn.

The three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have Nato membership and pro-western governments, but their significant Russian-speaking minorities have been shown by polling to be more sympathetic to the Kremlin line. Most people in Ukraine and Belarus also speak Russian, and Russian state television is available across the Baltics and Belarus and in parts of Ukraine.

Since a new government came to power in Ukraine last February after huge street protests, Russian state-owned television channels at home and abroad have derided the regime as a “fascist junta” while giving sympathetic coverage to the Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Combined with longstanding local grievances against the Kiev government, their broadcasts have helped to inflame tensions in the country.

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In a broadcast available on the aru.tv website called “Trash Parade 2014”, Troitsky ridicules some of the most bizarre moves made by Russian lawmakers in 2014.

“The customs union [of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan] on the orders of the Trade and Manufacturing Ministry has banned the use of lace panties in customs union countries,” a sardonic Troitsky says, wearing a “Navalny’s Brother” T-shirt in support of embattled opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “I think most lace panties are produced in China, this is by all appearances a serious blow, a serious plot against the Celestial Empire.”