East and West meet on celebrating victory in World War II?
Crimean Tatar TV Counts Minutes To Impending Shutdown
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine -- There is only one Crimean Tatar-language television channel in the world -- Simferopol's ATR television. But on April 1, this endangered species just might become extinct.
"We'll come to work as usual on April 1," ATR journalist Safie Ablyayeva says. "But we have no idea what we'll find, since we have just as much information as all Crimean Tatars."
ATR is currently broadcasting with a running countdown clock ticking down the seconds until the station's license expires. More than 190,000 people have responded to an online poll on the station's website, with over 99 percent expressing support for the channel.
Under Russian law -- which has been in force in the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea since Moscow's internationally unrecognized annexation of it in March 2014 -- ATR must register with the Russian telecoms oversight agency, Roskomnadzor, by April 1 or lose its right to broadcast.
But registering has turned out not to be as easy as one might have hoped. The Russian authorities have already sent ATR's paperwork back three times for corrections or additions.
"A month passes and then they give us some sort of formal objection," ATR General Director Elzara Islyamova told RFE/RL's Current Time television. "We either answer their question or make some sort of change and then resubmit and again we get a 30-day pause. You see, they can find such formal objections to delay the application for 100 years if they want." READ more
This ends our live-blogging for March 29. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.