Ukraine initiates a ban on entry for journalists who went on a tour to the occupied territories

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is initiating a ban on the entry of journalists and other participants of the press to the temporarily occupied settlements of Donetsk region, organized by the Ministry of Defense of the aggressor state. This was announced at a briefing by Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhyi, reports Ukrinform.

According to him, such tours are illegal and immoral while the Russian Federation commits crimes against journalists and kills them, and he revealed the list of media outlets that took part in it.

Tykhyi said that the trip to the occupied territories, in particular to Avdiivka and Kurakhove, was attended by journalists from the French AFP and TF1, the Associated Press, the Arabic Al Arabiya and Al Hadath, the American One America, the Chinese Phoenix and the Turkish Milliyet.

Kyiv is contacting these media outlets to convey the inadmissibility of such actions and the demand to stop them.

The Foreign Ministry spokesperson clarified that the tour was attended by individual citizens. These citizens are bloggers, former officials from the United States, Slovakia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France and Turkey.

"We have a list of such names. We will initiate entry bans for all the names on this list. People who do not respect the state border of Ukraine should not cross it in the future," he said.

For the media that took part in the tour, there will be a wider set of consequences for their reputation, emphasized Tykhyi.

• On September 22, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the illegal visit of the ambassadors of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to the temporarily occupied Crimea.
• On September 28, Tykhyi condemned the visit of foreign media representatives to the occupied territories.