The newspaper said that South Korea had agreed to sell artillery shells to help the United States replenish its stockpiles, insisting that the “end user” should be the U.S.
military. But internally, top South Korean officials were worried that the United States would divert them to Ukraine.

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.

* 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 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.

‘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.’

SEOUL, April 9 (Reuters) – South Korea is aware of news reports about a leak of several classified U.S.
military documents and it plans to discuss “issues raised” as a result of the leak with the United States, a South Korean presidential official said on Sunday.

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.

‘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.

Asked if South Korea planned to lodge a protest or demand an explanation from the United States, the official, who declined to be identified, said the government would review precedents and cases involving other countries.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

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.

“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”.