Ofcom said it noted new laws in Russia which “effectively criminalise any independent journalism that departs from the Russian state’s own news narrative”, particularly in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.
Ofcom said the decision to suspend the licence came amid ongoing investigations into RT’s news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson also having previously called for an Ofcom review.
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.
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 fearless traveller said Ukraine was still ‘safer than London or Birmingham’ at the time and previously boasted of visiting the country in 2019 to see Chernobyl – the site of the world’s most deadly nuclear meltdown disaster in 1986.
In a statement, she said: “Ofcom has shown the UK public, and the regulatory community internationally, that, despite a well-constructed facade of independence, it is nothing more than a tool of government, bending to its media-suppressing will.
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.
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Miles was forced to beg for money to continue the trip online – which he said was used for charity work in Kabul instead – while posting self-serving status updates about how his life has been ‘ruined’.
‘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.
He went against Foreign Office advice at the time not to travel to the ‘extremely volatile country’, which was plunged into chaos following the shambolic withdrawal of US forces after two decades of war.
* Russia threatened to bypass a U.N.-brokered grain deal unless obstacles to its agricultural exports were removed, while talks in Turkey agreed removing barriers was needed to extend the agreement beyond next month.
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.
* Russian forces have likely seized the center of the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and are threatening a key supply route for Ukrainian forces to the west, British intelligence said.
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.
It’s the first time the social media star, dubbed ‘Lord Miles’, has found himself jailed during his ‘self-destructive’ jaunts to the world’s most deadly areas – which include South Sudan and Brazil’s lethal ‘Snake Island’.
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 Taliban PR is not an official mouthpiece of the country’s rulers but have been posting about Routledge since March 15 and first suggested he was last seen in an area close to the Chinese border on March 6.
* Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova is due to visit India on Monday and will seek humanitarian aid and equipment to repair energy infrastructure damaged during Russia’s invasion, the Hindu newspaper reported on Saturday.
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.
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.
The media watchdog went on: “We take seriously the importance, in our democratic society, of a broadcaster’s right to freedom of expression and the audience’s right to receive information and ideas without undue interference.