RFE/RL Marks One Year of New Offices in Riga and Vilnius
January 12 marks the first anniversary of the opening of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Riga office.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today marks the first anniversary of the opening of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Riga office, which is home to more than 70 staff, including RFE/RL Russian Service and Current Time journalists forced out of Russia as the Putin regime cracked down on independent media.
“We are grateful for the support the Latvian authorities and people have provided in welcoming RFE/RL back in Riga,” said RFE/RL Acting President Stephen Capus. “We see this as reassurance for our mission to counter Kremlin disinformation and provide Russian-speaking audiences with trusted news and objective reporting.”
In March 2023, the Riga office launched Current Time Baltics, a public affairs program for Russian-speaking audiences in the region that airs live every weekday from 17:00-17:30 local time. Today, the program will air an interview with Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs about the security situation in the Baltic Sea region.
The Riga office also hosts eight reporters working for the Russian investigative unit Systema, which has published numerous groundbreaking investigations over the past year, including joint reporting with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian investigative unit Schemes on a fake private military company set up by Russian military intelligence.
This week also marked the first anniversary of the opening of RFE/RL’s office in Vilnius, Lithuania, which hosts 28 staff, many of whom are journalists exiled from Belarus in the aftermath of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s fraudulent 2020 re-election. RFE/RL’s Belarus Service and Current Time teams in Vilnius produce content for Belarusian audiences in Belarusian and Russian, respectively.
For more information, contact press@rferl.org.
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About RFE/RL
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a private, independent international news organization whose programs — radio, Internet, television, and mobile — reach influential audiences in 23 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus. It is funded by the U.S. Congress through USAGM.