Russian is the European Union’s seventh-most widely spoken language and the lingua franca of former Soviet countries in the EU’s eastern neighborhood. It’s a fact Europeans chose to ignore until last year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and helped ignite the conflict in eastern Ukraine, saying he was defending the rights of local Russian speakers.
When Crimeans applauded the annexation, it became clear that for years since the collapse of the Communist bloc, the EU has done next to nothing to win the hearts and minds of these Europeans. That has left them available for the increasingly barbed and sophisticated TV propaganda of the Kremlin.
With the largest proportion of the ethnic-Russian population in the EU, the Baltic countries Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia feel especially vulnerable. Twenty-four years after these countries regained independence from the Soviet Union, broadcasts from Moscow remain the prime source of information for Russian speakers there, largely because there is no robust alternative in their preferred language.
Now, with Ukraine still torn by strife and as Latvia hosts a raft of European summits this week in Riga, its capital, the propaganda battle is looking pretty one-sided. On TV in their hotel rooms, the arriving Eurocrats will find Russian channels vastly outnumbering both Latvian and international ones and churning out slick, pricey entertainment studded with fervid anti-Western commentary. The fun fare ranges from Russian franchises of Western shows, such as the U.K.’s Strictly Come Dancing, to homegrown entertainment, quiz shows, crime series, and sitcoms.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-21/the-putin-channel-eu-is-losing-tv-fight-for-mind-share-of-europe-s-russian-speakers
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