German broadcasters ARD and ZDF suspend reporting from Russia

German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF on Saturday stopped their reporting from Russia after Moscow backed the imposition of jail terms on media publishing "false information" about the military.

Published: 5 March 2022 15:53 CET

German broadcasters ARD and ZDF suspend reporting from Russia

ZDF is one of two national public broadcasters long with ARD. Photo: dpa | Andreas Arnold

In response to the new legislation the broadcasters would “suspend their reporting from their Moscow bureau for the time being”, WDR a member of the ARD broadcasting group said in a statement, following similar decisions by other news media including BBC News and Bloomberg News.

The public organisations would “continue to inform the public comprehensively over events in Russia and Ukraine from their other locations”,
the statement said.

Russian lawmakers have threatened to impose jail terms for publishing “fake news” about the Russian army, part of an effort to stifle dissent over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

BBC News, CNN, Bloomberg News, and the Canadian national broadcaster CBC announced similar decisions on Friday to suspend their work in Russia.

Russia on Friday also moved to limit access to the websites of several news organisations including the BBC and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Deutsche Welle had already closed its Moscow bureau at the beginning of February after Russia shut down the media outlet’s local operations to punish Germany for banning a service of a Russian state TV network.

ARD has had a studio in Moscow since 1956, according to the broadcaster’s website, and is responsible for their coverage from Ukraine and Belarus among other ex-Soviet countries, as well as Russia.

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Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the surface-to-air system was part of a build-up of German and European defences launched after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

“Russia has been massively rearming for many years, especially in the field of rockets and cruise missiles,” Scholz said at the inauguration ceremony at a base in Todendorf near the northern city of Hamburg.

Putin had broken disarmament treaties and “deployed missiles as far as Kaliningrad”, a Russian exclave located some 530 kilometres (330 miles) from Berlin, he added.

“It would be negligent not to respond to this appropriately,” the chancellor said. “A failure to act would put peace at risk. I will not allow that.”

Scholz, who was joined by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, said the system was part of the European Sky Shield Initiative, which also includes long-range defences against ballistic missiles.

The German military has ordered six of the Iris-T SLM systems at a total cost of 950 million euros ($1 million) from manufacturer Diehl Defence, to be delivered by May 2027.

Iris-T success in Ukraine

Germany, the second-largest contributor of military aid to Ukraine after the United States, has already supplied four Iris-T SLM systems to Ukraine and pledged another eight.

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov was visiting Germany on Wednesday, a day after a Russian missile attack killed at least 51 people in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, one of the single deadliest bombardments of the war.

The Iris-T systems sent to Ukraine feature truck-mounted launchers that fire missiles to intercept aerial threats at a range of up to 40 kilometres (25 miles).

Scholz said that “in Ukraine, Iris-T has shot down over 250 rockets, drones and cruise missiles to date and saved countless lives”.

The German leader said that Europe, aside from defensive systems, would also need more precision missiles of its own “so that there is no dangerous gap with Russia in this strategically important field”.

In July, Washington and Berlin announced that the “episodic deployments” of long-range US missiles, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, to Germany would begin in 2026.

Scholz stressed that “our sole concern is to deter potential attackers. Every attack on us must mean a risk for the attacker. Our concern is to secure peace here and prevent war, and nothing else.”