Russian news agency Sputnik closes all Nordic language services
Less than a year after the launch, Russian news agency Sputnik closes its websites in all Nordic languages.
Less than a year after the launch, Russian news agency Sputnik closes its websites in all Nordic languages.
Yesterday, through short messages on Twitter, Sputnik revealed that its information websites in Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Swedish are closed, and that “Sputnik now only provides English language service in your region.”
This is reported by The Independent Barents Observer.
Sputnik launched its websites in Nordic languages in April 2015.
The international multimedia service Sputnik was launched a year earlier, in 2014, by Rossiya Segodnya, an agency owned and operated by the Russian government. Sputnik replaced the English version of RIA Novosti, and is meant to be an alternative to “Western propaganda”.
The Head of Rossiya Segodnya, Dmitry Kiselyov, is on EU’s list of individuals sanctioned during the Ukrainian crisis for being a “central figure of the government propaganda supporting the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine”.
Sputnik still runs websites in Abkhazian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belorussian, Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, Dari, English, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Tajik, Turkish, Uzbek and Vietnamese.
In addition, Sputnik has just finished construction work on its new Asian editorial office in Beijing (China) and is set to open a cutting-edge multimedia press center in Minsk (Belarus).