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More than 5,000 former criminals have been pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in Russia's Wagner mercenary group against Ukraine, the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday. Wagner Group, originally staffed by battle-hardened veterans of the Russian armed forces, took on a much more prominent role in the Ukraine war after the Russian army suffered a series of humiliating defeats last year.

The ANC has remained silent about the International Criminal Court’s issuing an arrest warrant for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, but the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) said the Russian leader was “welcome” in South Africa. South Africa faces a diplomatic problem because Putin is among the international dignitaries expected to attend the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in the country in August. During a media briefing earlier this week, ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula dodged a question about whether the government would arrest Putin should he enter the country. South Africa as a member state of the ICC...

Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, will be attending the BRICS Summit in August this year, on invitation by the South African government. BRICS is a group of the world’s biggest emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and late-addition South Africa. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has issued a warrant of arrest for the Russian leader for war crimes stemming from the conflict with Ukraine that started over a year ago on 28 February 2022. The ICC warrant means that South Africa, a signatory to the ICC, will be obliged to arrest Mr Putin and hand him over if...

-snip- Opposition minority party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), has said Putin is welcome and EFF leader Julius Malema said that no one was going to arrest him in the country where Russia "played a huge role to support the struggle for freedom". -snip- "Putin is welcomed here. No one is going to arrest Putin. He [Putin] will address, finish all his meetings, and we will take him back to the airport," Mr Malema said. He continued: "We know our friends. We know the people who liberated us. We know the people who supported us." A spokesperson for President Cyril...

Russia's Wagner group is reportedly now turning its focus to Africa after suffering heavy losses in Ukraine amid the mercenary group boss' fall-out with Vladimir Putin. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the group, has been in a long-running dispute with the Kremlin, particularly with defence minister Sergei Shoigu. He has accused Shoigu of blocking the supply of ammunition and personnel to his private military group. Prigozhin and his mercenary group are currently battling in Bakhmut in Ukraine's Donetsk region. Fighting in the area has raged for eight months, producing some of the bloodiest and longest battles of the war. The...

The charitable foundation Save Ukraine that 17 children returned to Ukraine, all of whom were taken from the Kherson and Kharkiv regions during the Russian occupation of those territories. They were subsequently transferred either deeper into Russian-occupied territory or into Russia.A Save Ukraine press release says that Russia refused to return the children to their parents after Ukraine liberated the Russian-occupied territories from which they had been removed. “Complex logistics, constant danger, [crossing] the line of fire and several borders, for many of their [parents], turned getting the children back into a huge task,” said the foundation.[Video]A teenager, who was...

Russia laid out conditions on Monday for agreeing to any further extension of the Black Sea grain deal, and President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow could send free grain to African countries if those conditions were not met. -snip- Speaking at a Russia-Africa parliamentary conference in Moscow on Monday, Putin said grain exports under the Black Sea deal had unfairly prioritised "well-fed European markets" rather than African countries, and that the renewal of the deal on Russia's terms was in the continent's interests.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded the bulk of grain and fertiliser to be exported under the Black Sea Initiative must be channelled to Africa. -snip- Speaking to African government ministers on Monday during the International Parliamentary Conference, dubbed "Africa in a Multipolar World", in Moscow, Putin said his key demands were that Africans should be the biggest beneficiaries. "We insist on the package nature of this deal - above all, in the interests of African and other developing countries, considering that they need large amounts of food - we insist on full compliance with Russia's key requirements, first of...

On 19 and 20 March, some 40 African delegations travelled to Moscow ahead of the Russia-Africa summit scheduled for July in St Petersburg, to discuss cooperation and the fight against the influence of “former colonial powers”. There is but one step between Vladimir Putin’s office and the Duma in central Moscow. It was at the Russian parliament’s headquarters, just a few metres from the Kremlin, that the conference “Russia-Africa in a multipolar world” was held from 19-20 March, the second of its kind devoted to strengthening cooperation between African and Russian parliamentarians. The meeting came ahead of the next Africa-Russia...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis toughened his stance on Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling Putin a “war criminal” who should be “held accountable” for the invasion of Ukraine, just days after he claimed the Ukraine war is not a “vital national interest.” DeSantis angered Republican hawks, Never Trumpers, and neocons less than two weeks ago when he characterized the Ukraine-Russia conflict as a “territorial dispute” that is not a “vital” U.S. interests. DeSantis told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson: While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our border, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to clean up comments where he called Russia's brutal war on Ukraine a 'territorial dispute' after drawing rebukes against 'isolationism' but praise from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. 'Well, I think it's been mischaracterized. Obviously, Russia invaded — that was wrong. They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014 — That was wrong,' DeSantis told Piers Morgan in an interview more than a week after his initial comments. He also rolled out tough talk against Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him a 'war criminal' and saying he should be 'held accountable,' while dissing Russia as...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said Moscow has written off the debts of African states worth more than $20 billion. -snip- "The states of Africa are constantly increasing their weight and their role in world affairs, they are asserting themselves more and more confidently in politics and in the economy. We are convinced that Africa will become one of the leaders in the emerging new multipolar world order," Putin added. He said Russia and the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are against the neo-colonial ideology. "Russia and African countries uphold moral norms and social principles traditional for...

Russia's president Vladimir Putin, 70, is taking tanks as old as he is out of storage in his desperate bid to crush Ukraine on the battlefield. A video showing long obsolete Soviet-era T-54B and T-55A tanks - designed to be used in the armies of Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin - on a train carried across Russia, presumably destined for the frontlines of the war, has emerged. It comes with Putin having already raided museums and storage depots for retired T-62 battle tanks, which halted production 12 years ago. The geriatric T-54 was originally produced by Stalin after the Second World...

A gloomy assessment of Ukraine’s prospects for victory against Russia emerged from a recent private gathering of former top US soldiers, intelligence officials and scholars with resumes reaching from the Reagan to the Trump administrations.Short of trained personnel and ammunition, one speaker argued, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might consider a Chinese peace plan, especially after Beijing’s successful mediation of the Iran-Saudi dispute.The several dozen attendees, many of whom had held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions, met under Chatham House rules, which forbid identification of individual participants but allow the content itself to be presented.Overwhelmingly, the sentiment of participants leaned towards escalation...

Ukraine appears willing to engage China in mediation efforts to end the war, at a moment China's Xi Jinping is in Moscow discussing Beijing's own 12-point peace plan. With the main part of talks with Putin having been concluded as of Tuesday night, there's been no breakthrough among the "friends" to come of it thus far."We believe that many of the provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when they are ready for that in the West and in Kyiv. However, so...

Bakhmut is encircled. All roads in and out of it are under Russian artillery fire. Over the last three days fighting has largely stopped there. No one seems to know why the operation was halted. There are unconfirmed claims that Ukraine is preparing a counterattack to free Bakhmut from its encirclement. That attack is supposed to go off as soon as the muddy ground has dried up a bit. Meanwhile other encirclement has taken place in Avdiivka: Avdiivka (Ukrainian: Авдіївка, IPA: [ɐu̯ˈd(j)ijiu̯kɐ]; is a city of regional significance in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The city is located in the center of...

The news was jarring to those who had come to regard Volodymyr Zelensky as a warrior for freedom, standing unflinchingly against a sinister, unscrupulous and powerful foe: in December, he signed a decree banning the Church to which millions of Ukrainians belong, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Last Sunday, thousands of those Ukrainians gathered outside the Church’s headquarters, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, to pray and show their support for the monks whom Zelensky has ordered to vacate the premises. This is the new Churchill? A man who evicts monks from their monastery and closes churches? But...

Update(1017ET): What's being described as an initial, informal meeting between Presidents Xi and Putin is underway at the Kremlin. While the expected cordialities and expressions of closer relations were exchange, among the most notable early statements came from Putin, who said he's "open" to peace talks with Ukraine and China's mediation efforts."We have a lot of joint tasks, goals," Putin told his Chinese counterpart while also congratulating him on re-election as the head of the Chinese state for a third 5-year term. Xi in return said "Russia succeeded in promoting prosperity under Putin’s leadership." Putin further expressed that "we will...

Is he Putin on a front? A top adviser to the Ukrainian government stoked conspiracy theories Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been using body doubles to attend public events in his place. Anton Gerashechenko, an adviser to the minister of internal affairs of Ukraine, shared three recent photos of the Russian leader on Twitter — including two that were supposedly taken during a trip this weekend to Ukrainian territories. The side-by-side images feature red circles around the neck and chin area of the man in each photo, seeming to suggest not all three men pictured are Putin. An...

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued an ominous warning on Monday, suggesting that Russia could strike the International Criminal Court (ICC) with a hypersonic missile in response to its decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin. Attempts to try Putin in the ICC would have "monstrous" consequences for international law, Medvedev, deputy head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, said in a statement on his Telegram channel. The ICC, which is based in The Hague in the Netherlands, concluded on Friday that the Russian leader had committed war crimes in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine,...