* Russia threatened to bypass a U.N.-brokered grain deal unless obstacles to its agricultural exports were removed, while talks in Turkey agreed removing barriers was needed to extend the agreement beyond next month.
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.
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'.
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.
Russia has already accused the West of using its civilian space infrastructure to support the operations of the Ukrainian troops, including for combat strikes, and detecting the locations of Vladimir Putin's army and its movements.
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.
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.
'I realise I hadn't had an education, and I tried some side jobs, 9-5 jobs and none of it worked. So I did a bit of study on how to work in something you love. That was social media, and it's really started to take off in the last year.'
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.
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.
* Russian forces have likely seized the center of the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and are threatening a key supply route for Ukrainian forces to the west, British intelligence said.
In November 2022, a video surfaced Online Reading Program 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.
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.
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.
* Ukraine's First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova is due to visit India on Monday and will seek humanitarian aid and equipment to repair energy infrastructure damaged during Russia's invasion, the Hindu newspaper reported on Saturday.
Several Telegram channels critical of the Kremlin reported that students and employees of state institutions in a number of regions were ordered by their superiors to attend rallies and concerts marking the Crimea anniversary.
'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.
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'.
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.
The despot took to the stage dressed in a £10,000 Loro Piana jacket - despite his country's economy crumbling under the weight of Western sanctions - to address a crowd waving Russian national flags and banners marked with the letter 'Z', which has become a potent symbol of the invasion.
In the wake of the invasion, the Kremlin has cracked down harder on dissent and the flow of information, arresting thousands of antiwar protesters, Online Phonics PRE-K Grade Tutoring banning sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and handing out tough prison sentences for what it says is false reporting on the war, which Moscow refers to as a 'special military operation.'