Summary
Nearly three decades after it helped topple communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is challenging Moscow again, this time with a new 24-hour TV news channel in Russian. Officially launched in Prague this month, the "Current Time" channel targets an audience of more than 270 million people, mostly in the former Soviet area, with news and views that provide an alternative to the Kremlin's version of reality as channelled through state-controlled media.
As the official U.S. international broadcaster, VOA targets more than 236 million people a week in more than 45 languages.
Latvian state broadcaster LTV has a Russian-language TV and radio station as well as a news website to draw ethnic Russians away from almost exclusively pro-Kremlin media beamed in from Russia.
According to a 2016 TNS Emor poll, the stations, including ETV, ETV2 and ETV+, captured an audience of around 20 percent of ethnic Russians who account for a quarter of Estonia's 1.3 million people.
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