Russia “jamming” BBC radio - German paper

Russia “jamming” BBC radio - German paper

Text of report by Russian Ekho Moskvy radio on 24 December

[Presenter] For the first time after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia has reverted to the practice of jamming Western radio stations. For instance, the German daily Tagesspiegel reports that jamming makes it practically impossible to listen to BBC Russian Service in Moscow. Here is Saken Aymurzayev with the details.

[Correspondent] According to the German daily, Russia has reverted to the seemingly long-forgotten method after the recent events in London: the poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko and the British authorities’ refusal to extradite businessman Boris Berezovskiy and the Chechen separatists’ envoy Akhmed Zakayev. It was probably these events, Tagesspiegel notes, that led to a cooling in relations between Moscow and London. The paper sees one of the signs of the cooling in a suspension of BBC Russian Service FM broadcasting. This happened in late November and those listeners who could started receiving the BBC signal through the Internet. However, those who by old habits decided to listen to the radio station on medium waves were disappointed: the level of noise is such that it is practically impossible to hear anything.

[Presenter] The German paper, citing a BBC presenter, believes that the suspension of BBC FM broadcasting in Moscow and the beginning of jamming were done on the Kremlin’s instructions.

(Source: Ekho Moskvy radio, Moscow, in Russian 0900 gmt 24 Dec 06 via BBC Monitoring)