Serbian President and the candidate of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in next week's elections, Aleksandar Vucic, stated in a guest appearance on TV Prva, a television with a national frequency in Serbia, that he regularly watches Russian and Belarusian TV stations through Serbian state operator Telekom. He stated that some of the citizens of Serbia do not have the opportunity to watch channels from Russia (RT and Sputnik) because they are on the "Luxembourg" operator (SBB). We recall that the European Council decided to suspend the broadcasting of Sputnik and RT (Russia Today - RT English, RT UK, RT Germany, RT France and RT Spain) in the EU until the end of the aggression against Ukraine, and until the Russian Federation and media outlets close to the government stop the spread of misinformation and manipulation of information against the EU and its members. Serbia is an EU membership candidate country.

The host of the pro-government TV Prva stated that a number of citizens can still see the Russian media, while others cannot. Vučić wondered “how can they not? I watch the Russian media.”

Host: “They can’t. One cable operator… cancelled them.”

Vucic: “I am on the Serbian operator, you are on the Luxembourg one. So I can watch them.”

Host: “I can’t, for example, Russia Today, I can’t.”

Vucic: “Of course, you can’t, when you are on the Luxembourg operator. I’m on the Serbian one, and thank God I can watch all this. Including American televisions, Russian and French, and English and German. And Chinese. Even the Belarusian one, at 267. And I know everything when the news is and I watch what they report.”

Vucic says that when he watches Russian channels, he hears the same vocabulary that, as if someone was joking, NATO used in the aggression against Serbia.

“Today, Russians repeat the same words, whether jokingly or in reality. So, as they used to say a ‘humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo,’ the Russians say a ‘humanitarian catastrophe in Donbas.’ It’s like playing with Americans in their vocabulary. Thus, they said ‘we are preventing genocide in Kosovo’, the Russians are saying ‘we are preventing genocide in Donbas’. It’s as if they took the temple from everything that the Americans and the Europeans said about the issue of Kosovo and now they’re speaking in the same way,” the Serbian President said.

Telekom Srbija is majority state-owned and has continued to broadcast Russian and Belarusian channels following the European Commission’s ban. At the same time, all channels broadcast by Telekom are also offered by the operator Yettel, owned by the Czech PPF Group, one of the few European funds whose HomeCredit Bank has not closed its branches in Russia. Yettel operates within the PPF Group, which has concluded an agreement with Telekom Srbija on the lease of optical infrastructure. Yettel also uses media content from Telekom Srbija.