News Wire | Europe Archive

Russia Rejects US Claims Putin Likely Approved Prigozhin Killing

By Jennifer Jacobs and Alex Wickham | Bloomberg

“All of this is an absolute lie,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday. While there’s a lot of speculation about the cause of the plane crash that killed Prigozhin, the president is waiting for the investigation results that “will be completed in the foreseeable future,” Peskov said.

More from WPR: Understanding Putin, and Russia Under His Leadership

Italian Leader Tones Down Divisive Rhetoric but Carries On With Far-Right Agenda

By Frances D'Emilio | Associated Press

Since taking office in September, Premier Meloni has toned down the bombast reflected in the slogans she shouted last year at a rally in Spain for a far-right ally—“Yes to natural families! No to LGBT lobbies!” But her government and her party’s lawmakers are still pursuing multiple far-right policies, including refusing to allow the names of some same-sex parents’ to be on their children’s birth records, broadening restrictions on surrogate pregnancies and even seeking to ban foreign words from government documents.

A Plane Crash Believed to Have Killed Mercenary Chief Prigozhin is Seen as the Kremlin’s Revenge

Associated Press

Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and top officers of his private Wagner military company were presumed dead in a plane crash that was widely seen as an assassination, two months after they staged a mutiny that dented President Vladimir Putin’s authority.

More from WPR: The Wagner Mutiny Was a Preview of Russia’s Post-Putin Civil War

Hungarian President Pushes Past Orban to Reset Ukraine Ties

By Zoltan Simon | Bloomberg

Hungary’s president took the lead in trying to reset relations with Ukraine, meeting her counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a bid to push past Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Kremlin-friendly rhetoric.