A Wartime Blacklist, Growing by the Month
On June 25, 2026, Ukraine's National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting (NRADA) added six more Russian video-on-demand services — Лайт HD TV, HD KINO, ONLINE VKINO, KinoFlux, Кіносвинка, and Смотреть ТВ — to its registry of banned aggressor-state audiovisual services (Detector Media). NRADA's stated reasons were specific: the platforms defaulted to Russian as their interface language, streamed films banned in Ukraine, featured sanctioned individuals, and carried advertising aimed at Russian audiences. As of December 2025, the registry already held 56 blocked websites, TV channels, and online cinemas before this latest round (UNN).
This is not a one-off action. Ukraine's National Commission for the state regulation of electronic communications (NKEC), which actually orders internet providers to block the sites NRADA names, confirmed the mechanism runs on a rolling basis: providers get three business days to comply once notified, backed by fines that escalate from 2,000 to 4,000 non-taxable minimum incomes for repeat non-compliance (NKEC notice). That is a functioning enforcement pipeline, not an emergency improvisation.
Two Different Regulatory Tools, One Statute
It's worth separating what's actually happening here. The June 25 action targets Russian-owned platforms operating from outside Ukrainian jurisdiction, under the Law on Media's aggressor-state provisions (Law No. 2849-IX, "On Media"), which lets NRADA restrict foreign services tied to the state that invaded Ukraine. That is a distinct legal track from the same law's Ukrainian-language and European-content catalog quotas, which apply to VOD platforms legally operating in Ukraine — including Western services like Netflix and domestic ones like MEGOGO and Sweet.tv. Those quotas require at least 25% of VOD catalogs to be in Ukrainian and 60% of TV channel packages to broadcast in Ukrainian, both thresholds that phased in gradually and took full effect March 31, 2026 (UNN).
Steelmanning the Blacklist
The case for the aggressor-state registry is genuinely strong, and it would be dishonest to wave it away as ordinary censorship. Ukraine is fighting an active war in which Russian state media functions as a documented instrument of the invasion — not a metaphor, but a policy tool Moscow itself treats as strategic. A platform that defaults to Russian, screens films Ukraine has judged illegal, and promotes sanctioned individuals is not a neutral cultural product caught in overreach; it is closer to an enemy broadcast during wartime, the same category the EU itself invoked when it banned RT and Sputnik in 2022. Democracies routinely restrict enemy propaganda channels during active conflict without abandoning free-expression commitments generally, and NRADA's action against six low-profile piracy-adjacent sites is a narrow, targeted exercise of that power, not a sweeping speech restriction on Ukrainian citizens.
Where the Concern Actually Lies
The risk isn't this week's six bans. It's the infrastructure being built around them, and the fact that it's the same regulator running both tracks. When Ukraine's Law on Media passed in December 2022, press-freedom groups raised exactly this concern: the European and International Federations of Journalists objected that NRADA could suspend an "unregistered" outlet for two weeks without a court order, and the Committee to Protect Journalists warned the law was drafted without meaningful input from journalists themselves (Kyiv Independent). NRADA's council members are appointed by the president and a parliament his party controls — not exactly an arm's-length arrangement — and the blocking mechanism NKEC now runs on a three-day turnaround has no judicial check built into the ordinary process.
That matters because the same statute, the same council, and increasingly the same administrative reflexes govern the language-quota regime that reaches every VOD platform doing business in Ukraine, wartime security concerns or not. A blocking apparatus justified and built for denying enemy broadcasts during an active invasion is a different thing from a quota-enforcement apparatus aimed at a Ukrainian-licensed streaming competitor that simply hasn't hit its Ukrainian-language percentage yet. Right now those are legally separate tracks. But regulators that build fast, low-friction blocking powers for one purpose tend to reach for the same tool for adjacent purposes once the infrastructure exists — and Ukraine's registry has grown from a handful of sites to 56-plus in roughly two years without a public accounting of how many blocked platforms were pure information-war vehicles versus commercial VOD competitors that simply ignored the interface-language rule.
The Right Test Going Forward
Ukraine should keep blocking aggressor-state platforms that meet a genuine national-security bar — sanctioned personnel, banned content, propaganda targeting. But it should also publish, on a fixed schedule, how each newly listed service met that bar, rather than folding language-default complaints and banned-film complaints into a single announcement without distinguishing security removals from ordinary quota non-compliance. And when the war ends, the emergency-blocking track should sunset or move under judicial review — not simply persist as the default enforcement channel for content quotas that apply to legitimate competitors long after the security rationale that built the pipeline has expired.