The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria
Zakharova said that "the operation of this so-called peacekeeping resource
has harmed many journalists already".
MOSCOW,
November 23. /TASS/. Russia has lodged a note with the US Department of State
to protest the migration of Ukraine’s Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) website, which
discloses journalists’ personal information, to US servers. There has been no
reply from the US to this day, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
told the media on Thursday.
"We
have dispatched a note to the US Department of State with a description of the
Myrotvorets portal. Also, we demanded it should be denied hosting services,
because the operation of this so-called peacekeeping resource has harmed many
journalists already," she said. "So far there has been no formal
reply to our message. We keep this theme in focus."
"Feel the difference: close spying on any step Russian mass media may take and the information they spread, the maximum efforts to create a climate of intolerance towards Russian mass media, on the one hand, and utter indifference towards a website whose activity runs counter to all rules of corporate ethnics, on the other," she said.
Zakharova
added that the Myrotvorets website undermined the status of journalists which
was "so carefully protected by the entire international community"
and endangered their security.
Myrotvorets website
The
Myrotvorets website, linked with Ukrainian parliament member, Interior Ministry
adviser Anton Gerashchenko, was created in the spring of 2014 for establishing
the identities of Donbass militiamen and their supporters. The website
blacklists all those suspected of what the editors regard as crimes against
Ukraine’s national security. On its list of undesirable persons there are also
such anti-Russia-minded politicians as the leader of the Batkivshchina party,
Yulia Timoshenko, and former governor of the Odessa region, Mikhail
Saakashvili.
Also, the
Myrotvorets data base contains personal data of journalists on the staff of
such mass media outlets as RT, TASS, and also the BBC, Reuters, AFP, CNN,
Bloomberg, Al-Jazeera, Associated Press, the Independent, La Liberacion and
others. This online resource provides the journalists’ names, the names of
their outlets, positions held, mobile phone numbers, e-mail addresses and dates
when they visited territories beyond the Ukrainian government’s control. Such mass
media workers are accused of "acquiescence with terrorist
organizations."
When at the
beginning of 2016 a criminal case was opened against the Myrotvorets project’s
staff at the request of a group of Ukrainian and foreign correspondents and
demands by the EU the website should be blocked the project was closed down.
After a short while, though, the project resumed in defiance of numerous
protests.
Source: ITAR-TASS 23-11-2017
