Since the beginning of the large-scale Russian aggression, the invaders have increased the level of violations of the right to freedom to receive and disseminate information in the occupied Crimea, and then began to massively deprive of such right residents of the regions seized since February 2022, in particular Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhya regions.

This took place as part of the destruction, damage and seizure by the invaders of equipment, stations and channels of mobile communications and the Internet, television and radio companies, as well as in the framework of the persecution of journalists, bloggers, employees of Ukrainian providers and media, the creation of fake “information structures” and illegal “communications enterprises”.

Since May 2022, our Association has been reporting these negative trends to the International Telecommunication Union, as well as to the member countries of the Union, pointing out Russia’s violations of the relevant requirements of the Constitution and Convention of the Union, as well as its resolutions protecting national information sovereignty. The Association proposed to consider at the Plenipotentiary Conference 2022 (PP-22) of the Union, scheduled for September-October 2022 in Bucharest, the issues of the functioning of representatives of the Russian special services as Union “officials”.

Subsequently, the aspects of the violation by the aggressor of international documents, adopted under the auspices of the Union, were presented by the experts of our Association at the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference of the OSCE. As a result of the successful Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference, none of the candidates, persistently proposed by Russia, was elected to the Union’s governing bodies for the next six-year period.

The Conference also rejected the draft resolution proposed by Russia, in which, with a cynical manipulation of “fundamental human rights”, it was proposed to declare that the personnel of the working bodies of the Union cannot be removed from their posts for reasons not provided for by the organization’s statutory documents.

The fact is that decisions of a number of international organizations in 2022 not only excluded or suspended the membership of the Russian Federation, but also to terminate the powers of Russian citizens who worked as staff of the organization, formally “separately from the Russian Federation”. In Bucharest, the aggressor obviously wanted to “insure” against the same subsequent decisions of the Union, but did not achieve his goal.

According to the decisions of the Conference, the working bodies of the International Telecommunication Union are now headed by representatives of the USA and Latvia.

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