Within hours, Margarita Simonyan, the channel’s editor-in-chief, said she had suspended the host, Anton Krasovsky, because of his “disgusting” comments, adding that no one at RT shared his views. In his show broadcast last week, Krasovsky said children who criticized Russia should be “thrown straight into a river with a strong current”. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Krasovsky is a pro-war commentator on Russian television who has been sanctioned by the European Union. He was responding to an account by Russian science fiction writer Sergei Lukyanenko about how, when he first visited Ukraine in the 1980s, his children told him they would have better lives if Moscow didn’t own their country. “They should have drowned in the Tysyna (river),” Krasovsky said in response. “Just drown these children, drown them.” Alternatively, he said, they could be pushed into huts and burned. In a brief segment of the interview on social media, Krasovsky also laughed off reports that Russian soldiers had raped elderly Ukrainian women during the invasion. “Governments that have not yet banned RT should see this excerpt,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter, linking to an excerpt of the interview. “Aggressive incitement of genocide (we will prosecute this person for this), which has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Ban RT worldwide,” Kuleba added. Russian state television, which is largely controlled by the Kremlin, has been a vocal cheerleader for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The presenters have regularly dismissed reports of Russian war crimes, and many have used airtime to call on President Vladimir Putin to take an even more aggressive approach to the invasion. The Kremlin denies that its forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. In a statement on the channel’s website, Simonyan added: “For the children of Ukraine, as well as the children of Donbas, and all other children, I wish that all this will end as soon as possible and that they can live and study in peace. and again – in the language they consider their mother tongue.’ Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Report from Reuters. Edited by Clarence Fernandez Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
