The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, expressed disappointment over US funding cuts to Radio Free Europe and said the EU could not automatically fill the gap.
The US Agency for Global Media stopped grants over the weekend to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which was founded during the cold war and broadcasts to 23 countries, including Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Iran and Afghanistan.
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire tasked by Donald Trump with slashing the US federal government, called for the media group to be shut down last month, describing it as “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves”.
Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, who was born in the Soviet Union, said Radio Free Europe “has been a beacon of democracy”, alluding to it as a source of information in her younger years. She said the outlet’s funding had been discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.
“Now the question for us is, can we come in with our funding to fill the void that the US is leaving? The answer to that question is … not automatically,” she said adding that the EU would “see what we can do”.
The Czech Republic is leading a push for the EU to support the Prague-based media group. Ahead of the meeting, the Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, said he wanted to discuss with counterparts “how to at least partially maintain its broadcasting”.
“If it shuts down, it cannot be easily rebuilt,” Lipavský said.
The EU was already discussing how far it could fill gaps left by the abrupt termination of much of USAid, which goes far beyond the media group.
One senior diplomat has said the EU cannot make up the shortfall and that the bloc would be most likely to support projects that matched its own short-term interests.
Founded in 1950, with broadcasts to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania a year later, RFE aimed to bring unbiased local news to audiences behind the iron curtain. In 1953 Radio Liberty began broadcasting to the Soviet Union in Russian and other local languages.
According to RFE/RL, it reaches 47m people every week in 27 languages in 23 countries, with more than 1,700 staff.
Responding to the decision, Polish security expert Katarzyna Pisarska said her parents had learned about the Chornobyl nuclear disaster via RFE “while the Polish communist regime continued to hide the fact that a radioactive cloud was passing over Poland”. She described the US decision as “nothing more than a gift to dictators around the world” especially the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
RFE has been classed as “an undesirable organisation” in Russia since last February, effectively banning the outlet.
Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said: “These media outlets … can hardly be classified as popular and in demand in the Russian Federation,” describing the decision to cut funding as an internal decision of the US.
