“The training is part of our ongoing efforts to contribute to Ukraine’s long-term military reform and professionalism and to help improve Ukraine’s internal defense capabilities and training capacity”, said Donald Wrenn, a USAREUR spokesman.
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The journalists include a former MP of Latvia’s opposition Harmony party who writes for Latvia’s Russian-language daily, Vesti Segodnya, plus three other journalists from the same newspaper.
The BBC’s foreign editor, Andrew Roy, described the move against the BBC journalists as “a shameful attack on media freedom”.
The latest list of sanctioned persons was released on September 16, 2015, by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s administration.
Ukraine’s parliament on Wednesday voted to unilaterally scrap an agreement to jointly build with Russia two reactors at the Khmelnitsky Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in western Ukraine, the parliament’s press service said.
The Spanish pair, Antonio Pampliega and Angel Sastre, disappeared in Syria in July and are believed to have been kidnapped by the Islamic State group.
Later that month it also issued a “white list” of 34 foreign activists, artists, and performers, including Hollywood actors George Clooney and Jared Leto, whom the ministry says have spoken out against “Russian terrorist aggression”. “I want to stress the great danger posed by the decision to hold fake elections on October 18 and November 1”, Poroshenko’s website quoted the president as telling a visiting delegation of the European Union’s Political and Security Committee.
Ukraine held the Russian individuals on the sanction list responsible for the eastern uprising and the annexation of Crimea. “We appreciate that the situation in eastern Ukraine is sensitive but preventing journalists from reporting from withing the country is not the solution and it’s undermining freedom of information”.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement that it was “dismayed” by Mr Poroshenko’s actions.
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Nina Ognianova of the CPJ said: ‘While the government may not like or agree with the coverage, labeling journalists a potential threat to national security is not an appropriate response’.
