An aide to jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (pictured) today suggested Putin had massively miscalculated, predicting the ‘unpopular’ war and its economic consequences would lead to the ‘demise’ of his regime within five years.
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.
The other semifinal match was suspended due to rain one hour and 56 minutes in, with No.
4 seed Belinda Bencic of Switzerland leading No. 1 seed Jessica Pegula of the U.S. 7-5, 6-6. Pegula was leading the tiebreaker 4-2. That match will resume Sunday before the final.
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.
Meanwhile, an aide to jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny today suggested Putin had massively miscalculated, predicting the ‘unpopular’ war and its economic consequences would lead to the ‘demise’ of his regime within five years.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
Lvova-Belova told a news conference earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or math tutor year 8 legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
In his interview, Lukashenko – who allowed Russia to use his country as a staging post for the Ukraine invasion on February 24 – boasted that he and Putin were ‘friends’ as he bemoaned the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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.
A 2017 video posted Online English As Second Language Kindergarten Grade Teacher 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.
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.
‘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.
According to one US intelligence estimate, 7,000 Russian troops including four generals have already been killed – more than the number of American troops killed in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars at 4,825 and 3,576 respectively – and between 14,000 and 21,000 troops have been injured in the fighting. The estimated Russian death toll is of a scale similar to that of the Battle of Iwo Jima, where 6,852 US troops were killed and 19,000 were wounded during five weeks of fighting Japanese forces in the most intense phase of the Pacific theatre of World War Two
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.
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.
“By ignoring RT’s completely clean record of four consecutive years and stating purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine and yet completely unassociated to RT’s operations, structure, management or editorial output, Ofcom has falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper’ and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information.”
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.
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.