value. The Russian mercenary outfit Wagner has been spearheading the attack and claimed Monday that it had captured Bakhmut city hall — but Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has said his forces are still sufferi

‘I realise I hadn’t had an education, and I tried some side jobs, 9-5 jobs and none of it worked. So I did a bit of study on how to work in something you love. That was social media, and it’s really started to take off in the last year.’

Sophia wanted to show people that they don’t need to spend a lot of money to make amazing clothes and posted a clip demonstrating how she turned charity shop curtains into a stunning bustier dress with tied straps. 

She said: ‘I fell in love with the print and kept the fabric for “something special”. You will find with fellow sewers that we have bags of fabrics that we have collected over the years for “something special” and they never get used.’

She says that she remembers when she got her first commission from a work colleague, who wanted a dress for a party, she went home ‘crying’ because she was ‘flattered’ that someone believed in her and ‘trusted’ her to make her a dress. 

In December 2021, the European Union accused the group of ‘serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,’ and of carrying out ‘destabilizing activities’ in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

The Austrian lender is now the most important Western bank in Russia, offering a lifeline to people and businesses there seeking to make international payments, but it is under growing pressure from Western officials and investors to quit.

ZURICH, April 8 (Reuters) – Austria’s government is monitoring the global banking turmoil although there are so far no signs of it spreading to the country’s financial sector, Finance Minister Magnus Brunner said in an interview published on Saturday.

tion?” Kofman warned that Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov is “exhausting the force with an ill-timed, feckless set of offensive operations, whose gains will not change the strategic picture for Russia, but could leave Russian forces more vu

field. The outcome will depend “on the speed and scope of Western deliveries and the ability of Russian air defences to intercept this kind of weaponry”, said Igor Korotchenko, editor of the Moscow-based National Defenc

The Wagner Group has taken an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine as regular Russian troops suffered heavy attrition and lost control over some previously captured territory in a series of humiliating setbacks.

A 2017 video posted online showed a group of armed people, reported to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting his head before mutilating and then burning his body.

nable. Kofman said he believed that “the Russian military likely has the manpower and reserves to mount a stubborn defence” against a Ukrainian counter-offensive, with “minefields and trenches” at its

Some Russian media have alleged Wagner’s involvement in the July 2018 killings of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group’s activities there.

The terrifying group went viral in 2022 after a video of members beating a deserter to death with a sledgehammer spread online, has allegedly offered to help Haiti’s embattled government take on violent gangs, the documents detailed.

In November 2022, a video surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor Hamadi Bouta, a Syrian army deserter, getting beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was recaptured.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.

oscow. As spring arrives, the two armies are deadlocked with troops stretching from the shores of the Black Sea to northeast Ukraine — and the Kremlin has once again been forced to take the long view after failing to make a bre

‘This is a very interesting sign that there’s a degrading of their capabilities,’ Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times.

Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

osses. “Even if Bakhmut falls, the Russian invasion will fall well short of seizing control of Donetsk Oblast, one of its main territorial objectives”, the Washington-based Hudson Institute said in its latest milita