Ukraine war briefing: Russia vows to retaliate after state media reportedly blocked on Telegram in EU

Moscow says the move is ‘censorship’ and that it reserves the right to ‘respond in the same manner’. What we know on day 1,041

Russia has vowed to retaliate after the channels of its state media were apparently blocked on the popular Telegram social media platform in the EU. On Sunday the channels of Ria Novosti news agency, Rossiya 1, Pervyi Kanal and NTV television, and Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspapers were not accessible in several countries, including France, Belgium, Poland, Greece, the Netherlands and Italy, according to media reports. Neither Telegram nor EU sources have yet commented on the disruption. Moscow called the move “an act of censorship”. “The systematic cleansing of all undesirable sources of information from the information space continues,” foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, said. The EU had previously banned Russian state media such as Ria Novosti, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta from being distributed in the bloc, accusing them with disseminating propaganda.

Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, said on Sunday that the Azerbaijani airliner that crashed last week was shot down by Russia, albeit unintentionally, as he criticised Moscow for trying to “hush up” the issue. “We can say with complete clarity that the plane was shot down by Russia … We are not saying that it was done intentionally, but it was done,” he told Azerbaijani state television. Aliyev said that the airliner, which crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday and killed 38 of the 67 on board, was hit by fire from the ground over Russia and “rendered uncontrollable by electronic warfare.” Aliyev accused Russia of trying to “hush up” the issue for several days, saying he was “upset and surprised” by versions of events put forward by Russian officials. The Kremlin said that air defence systems were firing near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya, where the plane attempted to land, to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike.

A probe of the sabotaged Baltic Sea power cable has uncovered a drag trail stretching dozens of kilometres on the seabed, Finnish police said on Sunday. On Christmas Day, the Estlink 2 submarine cable that carries electricity from Finland to Estonia was disconnected from the grid, just over a month after two telecommunications cables were severed in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic. Finnish authorities have been investigating the Eagle S oil tanker that sailed from a Russian port over suspected “sabotage”. The investigation has revealed a “dragging track” on the seabed, police said on Sunday, adding the trail had been identified “from the beginning to the end”. The cable’s disconnection was the latest in a spate of incidents western officials believe are acts of sabotage linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Aleksei Bugayev, a former member of Russia’s national soccer team who played at Euro 2004, has been killed in the 34-month-old war in Ukraine, Russian media quoted his father and agent as saying on Sunday. “Unfortunately, the news about Aleksei’s death is true. It happened today,” TASS news agency quoted the player’s father Ivan Bugayev as telling the Sport24 news outlet.
RIA news agency quoted Bugayev’s agent, Anton Smirnov, as saying intense fighting had made it impossible to retrieve Bugayev’s body for burial. In September, Bugayev was sentenced by a court in southern Russia to nine and a half years in prison on drug trafficking charges. He later declared his intention to sign up to fight in the Ukraine war. Russian authorities actively recruit in prisons for the conflict.

Georgia inaugurated a far-right governing party loyalist, Mikhail Kavelashvili, as president on Sunday, ratcheting up a months-long political crisis that has seen huge pro-European Union demonstrations. Kavelashvili, a former professional footballer, is backed by the Georgian Dream party, which has accused the West of trying to drag Tbilisi into the Ukraine conflict.

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