Prigozhin is also known for his sharp criticism of Russia’s top brass over their performance in Ukraine. The Wagner group has been spearheading efforts in recent months to capture the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Putin is said to be furious at the slow pace of his campaign, which he had hoped to end within days given his country’s military superiority – on paper at least – and has fired at least eight generals since waging war on the former Soviet state, intelligence sources claim.
MOSCOW, April 8 (Reuters) – Hundreds of mourners, including the leader of Russia’s Wagner private militia group, attended the funeral on Saturday of pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed on April 2 in a cafe bomb blast that Moscow has blamed on Ukraine.
The 40-year-old Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was accorded military honours including a gun salute and an army band at the funeral at Moscow’s Troyekurovskoye cemetery due to his past participation in military operations in eastern Ukraine alongside Moscow-backed separatists battling Kyiv’s forces.
Facebook owner Meta Platforms will temporarily allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, Reuters reported last week.
In December, Rohingya refugees filed a $150 billion class-action complaint website in California, arguing that Facebook’s failure to police content and its platform’s design contributed to violence against the minority group in 2017.
The theme is one Putin has frequently discussed, not least when he suggested in speeches before the invasion that Ukraine was an artificial construct and an ‘inalienable part’ of Russian history and culture.
‘They also handed me a gun, after profuse warnings to keep my finger off the trigger since they didn’t unload it. I handed one of them my phone and grinned as he snapped a picture to commemorate the occasion.’
Facebook has come under fire for failing to curb incitement in conflicts from Ethiopia to Myanmar, where United Nations investigators say it played a key role in spreading hate speech that fuelled violence against Rohingya Muslims.
The TV watchdog said RT’s licensee, ANO TV Novosti, is ‘not fit and proper’ to hold a licence amid 29 ongoing investigations into the ‘due impartiality of the news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’.
‘If he is being treated well that is good to hear, as long as he is being well treated. If I can get a message to those who are holding him, I just want to ask them to tell him he has my love and support.’
A statement released by the regulator on Friday said: ‘We consider the volume and potentially serious nature of the issues raised within such a short period to be of great concern – especially given RT’s compliance history, which has seen the channel fined £200,000 for previous due impartiality breaches.
The network, which has been described as Vladimir Putin’s ‘personal propaganda tool’, was previously fined £200,000 for ‘serious and repeated’ breaches of impartiality rules over a string of 2018 broadcasts on the Salisbury poisonings and the Syrian war.
He had initially vowed to stay put in Kyiv despite the constant blaring of air raid sirens and attacks on residential buildings, but decided to leave after hearing reports of Russian soldiers ‘raping’ Ukrainian women.
“The disparity in measures in comparison to Palestine, Syria or any other non-Western conflict reinforces that inequality and discrimination of tech platforms is a feature, not a bug,” said Fatafta, policy manager for the Middle East and North Africa.
For Wahhab Hassoo, a Yazidi activist who has campaigned to hold social media firms accountable for failing website to act against Islamic State (ISIS) members using their platforms to trade Yazidi women and girls, Facebook’s moves are deeply troubling.
“While the policies of a global corporation should be expected to change slightly from country to country, based on ongoing human rights impact assessments, there also needs to be a degree of transparency, consistency and accountability,” he said.
Accompanying the photograph – which was sent from his phone or laptop on March 8th – was a short message downplaying the seriousness of his plight, even though the Taliban are notorious for torturing and murdering prisoners.
“Vladlen has proven that today the front line passes everywhere: in the zone of military action, in the rear, and in cities, hearts and minds,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the Telegram messaging app, noting he had died “in the centre of peaceful St Petersburg at terrorists’ hands”.
“It is not fair that a company can decide on what’s good and what’s not.” (Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran and Maya Gebeily @gebeilym; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly.
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