Latvia’s National Council for Electronic Media (NEPLP) has issued a broadcasting license to the Dozhd TV channel (TV Rain, put in the register of foreign media agents by the Russian Ministry of Justice), chairman of the council Ivars Abolins told Leta.

Dozhd appeared in the list of channels registered in Latvia on June 9, it will be broadcast from Riga. According to Abolins, negotiations lasted for about three months.

From the same day, broadcasting of 80 Russian TV channels was banned in Latvia, the head of NEPLP said.

Later, the information about obtaining a European license for broadcasting was confirmed by the editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Tikhon Dzyadko. “We will not be able to start broadcasting on June 9, but it will happen soon, when we are ready. We have many plans - to broadcast from different studios - in Latvia, Holland, France and Georgia. We will start small and gradually expand on the programming grid," he wrote on Telegram.

Dozhd suspended work on March 3. Two days earlier, Roskomnadzor blocked access to the channel’s website, as well as to the website of the Echo of Moscow radio station (subsequently, the Echo board of directors decided to liquidate the radio station and the website) at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office. The editors promised to challenge the blocking.

The text of the court decision, which TASS cited at the end of May, said that access to Dozhd was closed for "false information regarding the essence of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, its forms, methods of conducting combat operations, quantitative human losses of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, shelling and civilian casualties. The court considered that the channel's information "forms a panic mood among people, creates the prerequisites for massive violations of public order and public safety."

Dozhd CEO Natalya Sindeeva, explaining the decision to suspend the operation of the TV channel, pointed out that it was impossible under the conditions of the law on defamation, fake military operations and calls for sanctions, which could lead to up to 15 years in prison. In April, in an interview with the Financial Times, Sindeeva said that she was negotiating the possibility of resuming the broadcast of Dozhd from Europe.

Many employees of the TV channel, including editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko and director of the information service Ekaterina Kotrikadze, left Russia after the start of the military operation in Ukraine and the blocking of Dozhd.