Reporters Without Borders (RSF) launched its DTH satellite service Svoboda, providing independent journalism to Russian-speaking populations.
Nine Russian-language TV and radio channels are now broadcast on Eutelsat’s Hotbird satellite position at 13° East to countries including Russia, occupied territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Baltic states. The service uses the frequency 10,949 GHz V (27,500, FEC 2/3).
The launch event took place in Brussels on 5 March 2024 at the European Parliament, hosted by member of the European Parliament Andrus Ansip, with the participation of Vera Jourova, Vice-President of the European Commission, and in the presence of Russian civil society representatives and European members of Parliament. The RSF Secretary General Christophe Deloire and project director Jim Phillipoff announced that the package is live and unencrypted.
Named after the Russian word for “freedom”, the Svoboda Satellite Package is a broadcasting solution designed to bring reliable news sources to regions and populations fed by disinformation and propaganda. The package is accessible to 4.5 million households within the Federation of Russia and approximately 800,000 in occupied Ukraine. All of these households currently watch television from this satellite position and do not require any additional equipment to view the new channels, according to RSF.
The first offer of the Svoboda Satellite Package includes a diverse array of content providers such as Echo, Radio Sakharov, Current Time, Euroradio, TV8, Ost/West 24, as well as other channels featuring Dimitry Gordon, Irina Shikhman, IStories, Holod Media, Novaya Gazeta Europe, and more. Additional content providers will be added in the coming months as well as a new channel dedicated to news. The package will ultimately consist of up to 25 independent Russian-language radio and TV channels.
“In a context of a shrinking digital space in the Federation of Russia, the Svoboda Satellite Package is a testament to our unwavering commitment to the right to access journalism and an effort to build upon the resilience of the Russian journalism community in exile. Russian independent media are still read, viewed or heard by 6 to 9% of the adult population, we need to increase their reach. RSF is determined to empower Russian-speaking populations with the tools they need to preserve freedom of opinion. We prove that democracies can export independent journalism, to reverse the logic of propaganda, which is exported by despotic regimes. Instead, we allow independent journalism to be exported from democratic countries toward populations under despotic control,” said Christophe Deloire, Secretary General of RSF.
Vera Jourova, Vice-President of the European Commission, added: “Independent media and journalists are in the frontline in the current information warfare. We need to use all possible means to ensure that their work, that facts and information can reach Russian-speaking people. The Svoboda Satellite Package is part of these efforts. Supporting media freedom and fighting disinformation are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary to defend democratic values.”
Managed by RSF, the project builds upon the work of the Denis Diderot Committee. The main goal of the committee was to contribute to the restoration of the free flow of information, without war propaganda, between Europe and Russia with a view to providing support to Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian civil societies.
“The Diderot Committee launched the idea of a bouquet of independent channels as soon as March 2022. We thank RSF and Eutelsat Group for making this project possible on Hotbird 13G. We consider that the broadcast of the Svoboda bouquet from the 36°E position must remain the objective,” said André Lange, Co-Founder of the The Denis Diderot Committee.