MIR Interstate Television and Radio Company
The “Mir” Interstate Television and Radio Company (Мир), or МТРК, is a state-owned broadcasting consortium founded on October 9, 1992, when the heads of state of ten former Soviet republics signed an agreement in Bishkek establishing it as a joint media project of the Commonwealth of Independent States, an intergovernmental organization comprising states in the Eurasian region. The founding “shareholders” of “Mir,” which was organized as a closed joint-stock company, were Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The company operates national branches and representative offices in nine CIS countries, including Belarus, alongside its Moscow headquarters, and broadcasts primarily in Russian. Its output today includes the television channels Mir and Mir 24, Radio Mir, and the online portal MIR24.TV, which the broadcaster describes as covering the political, economic, and humanitarian cooperation of CIS member states and helping preserve a shared post-Soviet information space. In April 2023, Moldova’s government revoked the intergovernmental agreement governing Mir’s operation in the country, part of a wider distancing from CIS-era arrangements with Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Government spokesman Daniel Voda said at the time that Moldova “will no longer finance propaganda and disinformation,” referring to Mir’s coverage of the war.