The court heard in the early hours of that morning Williamson’s phone was used to access YouTube videos including one called: ‘Spoon is used to remove man’s cyst’ by Dr Pimple Popper and another called ‘Large blackhead abstraction’.

Speaking in front of banners that read ‘For a world without Nazism’ and ‘For Russia’ – with the letter ‘Z’ in each picked out in bold – he said: ‘Sevastopol [capital of Crimea] did the right thing when they put up a barrier to neo-Nazis and radicals, which is already happening on other territories. 

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. 

Putin, who called the rally to mark the anniversary of the last time he attacked Ukraine to annex the Crimea region, spoke of sharing a ‘common destiny’ with Crimeans, of ‘de-Nazifying’ the region in 2014, and of the ‘bravery’ of soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine.

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.

Putin used the rally to peddle falsehoods about why the war started and to shill a narrative of Russia’s battlefield success, speaking of ‘how our guys are fighting during this operation, shoulder to shoulder, helping each other’

Putin fans in the crowd were seen waving banners emblazoned with the letter ‘Z’, which has been adopted as a symbol of the invasion and the Kremlin’s wider aim of restoring national pride through conquest

Tens of thousands of flag-waving Russians packed out Moscow’s Luzhniki World Cup stadium on Friday as the despot attempted to drum up support for his stalled invasion of Ukraine, peddled debunked claims about why the war started and shilled a false narrative of Russia’s battlefield ‘success’.

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.

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.

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.

And a bizarre moment in the speech came when Putin suddenly disappeared from news feeds in mid-sentence – replaced by a band that was mid-way through singing, perhaps suggesting his address was not broadcast live. 

‘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, Online Phonics PRE-K Grade Teacher Libya and Mali.

The event was heavily anti-Western and filled with Soviet nostalgia, as Russian authorities ramped up patriotism in response to being hit by massive international sanctions for Putin’s Ukraine campaign, which has stalled thanks to fierce resistance.

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.

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.

Vladimir Putin gave a a tub-thumping address yesterday to tens of thousands of Russians gathered at Moscow’s world cup stadium, celebrating his invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and drumming up support for his new war

In his speech, Putin quoted the Bible’s book of John, praising his troops in Ukraine. ‘The words from the sacred scripture come to my mind: “There is no greater love than if someone laid down his life for his friends,”‘ he said.

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.

Vladimir Putin’s tub-thumping speech yesterday was likened to ‘Billy Graham meets North Korea’ by a Russian commentator, a reference to both the American Christian evangelist and Kim Jong-un’s propagandising rallies, while the YouTube live stream of the rally was flooded with critical comments.