The first
Congress of People's Deputies adopted a 21 June 1990 resolution about
RSFSR media, instructing the Council of Ministers to establish the Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the RSFSR. On 14 July, a
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree established the Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. Former
Moscow News deputy editor Oleg Poptsov, was appointed its first chairman. On 10 December of that year,
Radio Rossii began broadcasting on a channel with the
All Union First Programme of
All-Union Radio,
Radio Mayak and the Third All-Union Radio. RTR began broadcasting television to Russia on 13 May 1991 (after a postponement from March of that year) along with
Programme Two.
Soviet Central Television's Programme Two closed on 16 September, and RTR took over the remaining airtime. In April 1992, the
Russian Universities TV channel began to replace
Programme Four. Russian Universities broadcast with the
Ostankino 4th channel from 6 July 1992 to 16 January 1994, and after 17 January 1994 with
NTV as part of RTR. In accordance with a February 1996
presidential decree by
Boris Yeltsin, Oleg Poptsov stepped down as chairman and
Eduard Sagalaev, then president and founder of the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation (MIBC), was appointed in his place. On 11 November 1996, Russian Universities ceased broadcasting and its airtime passed to NTV. On July 19, 1996, its first satellite TV networks, Meteor-Sport and Meteor-Kino, were launched. On 1 November 1997, RTR began broadcasting the "Kultura" educational channel. A presidential decree "On Improvement of Public Electronic Media" was drafted on 8 May 1998, based on information about RTR. Based on the decree, the
Voice of Russia was created and
Radio Mayak was reorganised. In 2001 RTR acquired a 1.8-percent stake in
Euronews, which launched a Russian-language service later that year. RTR began test broadcasts of the Kino-TV channel on 3 December 2012. It began test broadcasts of the high-definition TV channel Rossiya HD on 17 December, which began regular broadcasting on 29 December 2012. On 29 January 2013, at the Annual Exhibition and Forum of Television and Telecommunications (CSTB-2013), RTR announced the merger of eleven digital channels as "Digital TV". It includes documentary, sports, entertainment, and movie channels: History, Russian-HD, My Planet, Nauka 2.0, Sport, Sport-1-HD, The Fighting Club, Russian Roman, Russian Bestseller, Strana, and Sarafan. RTR began the Russian Detective channel (with domestic detective films and TV series) on 4 April 2014, and launched the international entertainment channel IQ HD eleven days later. As a reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the
European Union expressed plans for a ban of three of the largest Russian state-run broadcasters in early May of that year. The BBC reported that they were thought to include the RTR channels Rossiya and RTR Planeta. The EU had already banned RT and Sputnik, which broadcast in English, German, and Spanish. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced in June that the one million residents of the occupied southern Ukrainian Kherson region would receive RTR channels instead of Ukrainian television. On 8 July, the company was sanctioned by Canada. In March 2022,
YouTube blocked its RTR channel along with other Russian state media outlets. YouTube blocked several dozen other RTR channels in February 2024, including regional channels in
Rostov-on-Don,
Pskov,
Vologda, and
Murmansk. ==Operations==