By Lili Bayer
BRUSSELS/PRAGUE (Reuters) -EU powers said on Monday they would try to save Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – the U.S.-funded news outlet set up to reach people under communism during the Cold War – but warned they might struggle to replace funding cut by Donald Trump.
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky urged EU ministers at a meeting in Brussels to consider ways to allow the Prague-based service to continue to provide news coverage in countries where free media is banned or in its infancy.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called Radio Free Europe “a beacon of democracy” and said it was sad that the U.S. had decided to cut its funding. She said ministers had agreed to look at what the EU could do to help but it would not be easy.
“Can we come in with our funding to … fill the void that U.S. is leaving? The answer to that question is … not automatically, because we have a lot of organisations who are coming with the same request to us,” she told reporters.
“But there was really a push from the foreign ministers to discuss this and find the way, so this is the tasking to our side, to see what can we do.”
Touted by U.S. President Trump as a move to cut back on federal bureaucracy, the U.S. Agency for Global Media over the weekend terminated grants to RFE/RL, which broadcasts to Iran, Russia, Belarus and war-torn Ukraine among other countries.
RFE/RL journalists kept working on Monday with stories appearing on its website.
RFE/RL President and CEO Stephen Capus said in a statement over the weekend that the cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s grant agreement “would be a massive gift to America’s enemies”.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Monday “we will look at what can be done” to assist both Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, where more than 1,300 employees were placed on leave on Saturday.
Trump also signed an executive order on Friday aimed at gutting the parent of U.S. government-funded media outlet Voice of America and six other federal agencies, shortly after his government cancelled more than 80% of all the programmes at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Trump ally Elon Musk called for RFE/RL to be shut down in a post on X last month, saying “it’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves”.
(Reporting by Lili Bayer, Andrew Gray and Geert De Clercq, writing by Krisztina Than and Jason Hovet, editing by Andrew Gray, Timothy Heritage, Ed Osmond and Andrew Heavens)
