A pro-Kremlin television presenter has been accused of inciting genocide after calling for Ukrainian children to be “drowned” and “burned” alive during an interview on the state-funded RT channel.
Anton Krasovsky, the chief of Russian-language broadcasting for the channel formerly called Russia Today, said Ukrainian children who said they were being occupied by Russia should be
“thrown in a river with a strong undercurrent”.
But even in the era of Russian wartime propaganda, where it appears that allmost anything goes, Krasovsky’s remarks have provoked a backlash, commented The Guardian.
They should have been drowned in the Tysyna river,”
said Krasovsky during an interview with the fantasy writer Sergei Lukyanenko.
“Just drown these children. Drown them!”
Recently he was suspended from RT, and the head of Russia’s powerful investigative committee said it would review his remarks as part of a potential criminal investigation.
The incident has been deeply embarrassing for RT, which has been a vocal cheerleader for the war but also distanced itself from his remarks.
“For the moment, I am halting our cooperation [with this Krasovsky], because neither I nor the rest of the RT team can allow even the thought to flash that one of us is capable of supporting such savagery,” wrote RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, in a post.
Still Russian state media has previously hosted commentators who have denied the existence of Ukrainian culture or called for the country’s total annexation by Russia.
It is also still very unclear what has happened to the tens of thousands of children who were robbed from Ukraine by the Russian military forces.
I'm afraid we'll never see them alive again.
