The RT–Sputnik Regional Network — Eight EU-Banned Channels, All Live

When we published RT on Odysee in May, the story was one channel: @RT, created four days after the invasion of Ukraine, the same week every major Western platform cut RT off. The July sweep shows that was the tip of the operation. Odysee hosts the regional network: RT's German and French outlets and five Sputnik-branded regional channels — every one of them named by or covered under the same EU distribution prohibition, every one live.

The German operation outgrew the flagship

The most striking number in the table: @RTDE — RT Deutsch — carries 161 flagged items, more than twice the flagship English channel's 74. RT DE lost its EU broadcasting rights twice over: first when Germany's regulator ordered it off air in February 2022, then under CFSP 2022/351 the following month. On Odysee it simply kept publishing, in German, for a German-speaking audience the instrument was written to protect. Its items dominate our German-language matches — including, incidentally, most of the innocent matches for the German word "Atomwaffen" (nuclear weapons) that our sanctions methodology has to filter out.

What the law actually says

Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351 and the parallel Regulation 2022/350 prohibit operators from broadcasting or "enabling, facilitating or otherwise contributing to disseminate" content of RT and Sputnik entities in the Union — explicitly listing RT English, RT UK, RT Germany, RT France, RT Spanish, and Sputnik. This is not a content-moderation judgement call; it is a bright-line distribution prohibition that has bound every EU-facing platform since March 2022. YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Twitter/X geo-blocked or removed these outlets within days. Odysee serves EU users, monetises stake on this content (the network's 63,444 LBC implies ~3,172 LBC in platform fees), and has taken no visible action in over four years.

Watchlist status

All eight channels are now recorded on our sanctions watchlist as operated presence — the entities themselves run the handles — with per-handle counts and the designation instruments cited. The RT and Sputnik entries join SouthFront (EU + OFAC), Hezbollah's relay @Alchimie, and the content-presence entries added in this round. As with everything on that page: every number is reproducible from the public dataset.