Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has asked the European Union to hold Serbia accountable for hosting Russian state media network RT, which RSF calls "Vladimir Putin's factory of lies."

Reporters Without Borders says that the EU should take these steps because RT Balkan uses its office in Belgrade to "adapt the Kremlin's narratives" and broadcast propaganda throughout southeastern Europe.

RSF announced on its website: “Thanks to the Serbian government’s grip on the media and favorable political environment, RT – formerly Russia Today – uses its Belgrade office to adapt the Kremlin's narratives before disseminating them across southeastern Europe. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the European Union (EU) and its member states to hold Serbia accountable for hosting Vladimir Putin’s factory of lies.

In September 2024, RSF asked RT about the mission of its new Balkan bureau and its relationship with the Russian government. RT’s Moscow headquarters replied immediately, and sarcastically: “We have established RT Balkan with the sole purpose of annoying Reporters Without Borders.” The provocative, political answer shows how RT positions itself as the antithesis of an organization that defends a free, independent, and pluralist press. Yet it also reveals that RT does not want to disclose information about its objectives or its relationship with the government, which an independent media – as this Russian outlet claims to be – should be able to provide.

“Thanks to RT Balkan, the Kremlin’s war propaganda is thriving within the EU’s borders. In Serbia, a nation surrounded by EU members and candidate countries, Russian narratives are packaged for local audiences before being distributed across the region. This factory of lies must be closed. The EU and its member states must hold Serbia – which aspires to join the EU – accountable for facilitating the work of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine, implement systemic solutions to protect Europe’s information space, and firmly support trustworthy journalism as a guarantee of citizens’ right to information”, Pavol Szalai, Head of RSF’s EU-Balkans Desk commented.

Since its establishment in Moscow in 2005, RT has developed into a network of television channels, websites, and social media accounts publishing content aligned with the Kremlin’s propaganda in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German and Russian.

RT Balkan was officially launched on November 15, 2022. Marketed as an online broadcasting service and multimedia website in the Serbian language, it aimed to provide “an alternative perspective on regional and world events,” with plans to expand to a television channel by 2024.

RT Balkan’s office, which opened in parallel, is not RT’s newest regional bureau. Bureaus had already been established in over twenty cities, including Washington DC, Paris, London, Jerusalem and Berlin. In 2023, the Moscow-based outlet inaugurated a bureau in Algeria as part of a strategy to reinforce its presence in Africa.

A tweet by RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan hints at RT’s motive to expand to Serbia: “We started RT in the Balkans. Because Kosovo is Serbia.” In the official press release, Simonyan is further quoted as saying: “Perhaps nowhere in the world were we more eagerly awaited than here. And so I would like to speak to our dear Serbian friends in their native language: ‘Браћо, гледајте RT.’ [Brothers, watch RT].”

In March 2023, in her first interview for the local media — given to Serbia’s public broadcaster — Jelena Milincic, editor-in-chief of RT Balkan at the time, said, “We are not here to operate a website, but to start a television channel. We have been invited to come to Serbia for a very long time […] It is in Serbia’s interest to have a Russian TV station here as well. We currently have a site that is, of course, less successful than Sputnik [a Russian state news agency], but television is the goal [...] RT is seen as the modern child of Russia.” Milincic added that RT Balkan is registered as a Serbian media, even though it is funded from abroad.

Two years after its launch, RT Balkan still has no television channel. Nevertheless, it has grown into Russia’s main vehicle for spreading propaganda in the Balkans, according to the unanimous opinion of experts researching Russian influence in Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro, who were quoted in a recent documentary of the regional media network BIRN.