Lithuania orders providers to block 12 radio sites that carried Sputnik

Lithuania's broadcasting regulator LRTK has ordered the country's internet providers to block 12 websites through which the sanctioned Russian station Radio Sputnik could be heard online. The decision was taken on 16 September and published on Friday, 18 September; providers have two working days from the moment it takes effect. Only two of the twelve addresses belong to Sputnik itself. The rest are a streaming server and eight general online-radio directories, one of which advertises more than 22,000 stations, all of which will now disappear behind the same block. LRTK chairman Mantas Martišius says sanctions "must work not only on paper". For listeners in Lithuania the practical effect is the one that follows every domain block in the EU: the station moves to the next aggregator, and the directories come back only through a VPN or a foreign DNS resolver.

What LRTK found and what it ordered

Radio Sputnik, the international radio arm of the Russian state group Rossiya Segodnya, has been banned in the EU since March 2022 together with RT's English, UK, German, French and Spanish channels. The ban is broad: member states must prevent the programmes from being broadcast or "enabled, facilitated or otherwise contributed to" by any means, and in Lithuania that job falls to LRTK, the Radio and Television Commission. The station has two routes into the country. One is the airwaves: a transmitter in the Kaliningrad region sends it on 87.9 MHz, a frequency not coordinated with Lithuania, and Lithuania answers by transmitting interference, the "white noise" the regulator describes, on the same frequency. The other is the internet. Between 21 and 26 August LRTK's monitors tuned in through twelve websites: Sputnik's own radiosputnik.ru and its Perm affiliate sputnikperm.ru, the stream server icecast-rian.cdnvideo.ru on a Russian CDN, and nine directories of internet radio, Russian and Belarusian, where Sputnik is one entry among thousands. On 16 September the commission decided to oblige every Lithuanian provider to cut access to all twelve within two working days of the decision taking effect; the addresses join the national Cyber Security Information Network blocklist and LRTK's published register of sanctions-related restrictions. "If the content of programmes banned in the European Union moves to other distribution channels and again becomes reachable for Lithuanian users, we have to react," Martišius said. "In this case we identified specific websites through which Sputnik could be listened to, so access to them will be removed."

Why a station ban becomes a directory ban

The list shows how sanctions enforcement works once a programme leaves its own website. Sputnik's stream is a single audio URL; any directory that lists it, and there are hundreds, becomes a "distribution channel" in the regulator's reading of the EU rules. LRTK does not block the stream, which it cannot reach, but the sites where its monitors happened to find it. Eight of the twelve are ordinary catalogues of internet radio with no editorial connection to Sputnik; radio-online.ru alone claims more than 22,000 stations by its own count. All of it goes dark for Lithuanian subscribers to remove one entry. The regulator's own history says what happens next: 24 addresses for Russian TV channels in June 2025, one more network in February, 32 domains and 27 IP addresses in May, twelve sites in September, each batch found by monitoring after the previous one was circumvented. Latvia's regulator, working from the same EU list, has already reached three of the twelve; when this site tested them from Riga on 18 September, radiosputnik.ru, radiopotok.ru and top-radio.ru all redirected to the Latvian "access restriction" page, while the other nine opened normally. The same logic is being written into a US bill for pirate sites: the target is a stream, the tool is a domain, and the collateral is everything else on the domain. None of this is a defence of Sputnik, which is on the EU list because it is a propaganda outlet of a state at war. It is a note on the instrument. Blocking a directory to silence one station is the kind of measure that gets copied for the next station, and then for content that is not on any sanctions list.

What changes for listeners

For anyone in Lithuania who used one of the eight directories for something other than Sputnik, the sites will stop resolving within days, and the fix is the standard one for an EU domain block: a DNS resolver outside the provider, or a VPN, both of which are legal in Lithuania and both of which the regulator's method cannot see. Sputnik itself needs neither; it needs a thirteenth directory, and there are thousands. That asymmetry, a station that costs nothing to relist against a regulator that needs a monitoring round and a commission decision for every address, is why the list grows by dozens of entries a year without the programme ever going off the air. The FM half of the story is more effective, since a jammer on 87.9 MHz needs no cooperation from anyone, and it is telling that the regulator leads its own press release with the radio frequency rather than the websites. The internet half will be back on the agenda by the next monitoring round, and so, most likely, will another handful of aggregators that never asked to carry the station in the first place.