Romania’s National Audiovisual Council is set to decide at its next meeting whether to allow a Moldovan television channel that broadcasts Russian state TV programs to operate in Romania, Balkan Insider reports.

Local experts and journalists have warned that the station might give a powerful voice for Kremlin propaganda.

Russia-RTR is a state-owned Russian-language channel, owned by the state company VGTRK. It rebroadcasts internationally programs by Rossiya 1, Rossiya Kultura and news channel Rossiya 24.

In Moldova, it owns RTR Moldova television channel, which also broadcasts its own local news both in Russian and Romanian language.

The Moldovan company operating RTR in May registered a branch in Iasi, eastern Romania, called Telecontent Productions SRL, and applied for a license to broadcast in the country on cable.

Romania’s broadcast watchdog discussed the application on August 10 but council members postponed making a decision.

The council was scheduled to convene on Thursday, August 17, but the meeting was postponed to a date that the council said would be announced soon.

Romanian journalists and media analysts say RTR’s application might be successful.

Mihai Pavelescu, a journalist who covers cable television news in Romania, and who was present at the August 10 hearing, said some members of the broadcast watchdog found the request from RTR to be legitimate. Others questioned the content of the programs that station plans to broadcast in Romania.

The administrator of RTR in Romania, Veaceslav Cristea, who is a Romanian-Moldovan citizen and who registered the company in Iasi in May, told the Council hearing that the station would not be broadcasting political shows. He said it would present a mix of locally produced and Russian broadcasts, such as entertainment shows.

A recent monitoring report released by the Independent Media Association in Moldova said that news shows and others programs on RTR, rebroadcast by RTR Moldova, “made use of a number of manipulation and propaganda procedures”.

Most often, the report said, RTR manipulated the news to present pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine, anti-US and anti-NATO views. Conversely, its programs emphasized pro-Kremlin views.