On May 16, Ukrainian President Poroshenko
signed an expanded blacklist consisting of 1,228 Russian individuals and 468
companies.
MOSCOW, May 17. /TASS/. Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjorn Jagland has voiced concern over Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko’s decree blocking Russian social networks and other internet resources on the country’s territory, a statement published on the Council’s website said.
The "Council of Europe Secretary General has voiced his concern about a decree by Ukrainian President Poroshenko on the blocking of several major online services and social networks on the territory of Ukraine," the statement reads.
According
to Jagland, the "blocking of social networks, search engines, mail
services and news websites goes against our common understanding of freedom of
expression and freedom of the media." "Moreover, such blanket bans
are out of line with the principle of proportionality," he added.
On Tuesday,
Poroshenko signed an expanded blacklist consisting of 1,228 Russian individuals
and 468 companies. This time, a number of the Russian State Duma (lower house
of parliament) members, judges of the Russian Constitutional Court, journalists
and TV channels have been added to the blacklist. Besides, sanctions have been
imposed on several Russian companies, including 1C, ABBYY and their Ukrainian
subsidiaries. In addition, Russia’s VKontakte and Odnoklassniki social
networks, Mail.ru and Yandex internet companies have been banned.
The banned
Russian internet companies have a significantly large audience in Ukraine.
Yandex claims to have as many as 11,000,000 Ukrainian users while about
25,000,000 of Ukrainian citizens use the Mail.ru platforms for communication. A
total of 16,000,000 people in Ukraine use the Vkontakte social network, while
the number of Odnoklassniki users totals around 9,500,000.
Source: ITAR-TASS 18-05-2017
