Ukraine banned import of a total of 151 books with an overall circulations of about one million copies from Russia in 2019 on ideological grounds, Ukraine’s State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting said on Tuesday.
As follows from the Committee’s press statement, these printed products ran counter to the criteria for such products that could be circulated in Ukraine.
Apart from that, the regulator did not issue permits to import 2,171 more printed products due to the lack of necessary documents or inaccurate information in such documents.
Nevertheless, as many as 4,652 permits for printed products from Russia and non-controlled Ukrainian territories were issued in 2019.
A law banning imports of "anti-Ukrainian foreign printed matter" came into force in Ukraine in early 2017. Pursuant to the law, the government in April 2017 adopted a procedure of withdrawal from circulation of Russia-printed materials that had reached Ukraine without a corresponding permit. The State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting was endowed with the right to issue such permits on the basis of an expert council opinion.
