Russian talk show host suspended after saying Ukrainian children should be drowned or burned

A Russian talk show host, Anton Krasovsky, apologised Monday after he was suspended by a Russian state broadcaster for suggesting that Ukrainian children should be drowned or burned in their homes.

“I apologise to everyone who was stunned by this,” said Krasovsky, 47, a director of broadcasting for RT, the state-funded television channel, which announced his suspension late Sunday.

“It was just tasteless,” Krasovsky said in two statements posted to Telegram, calling the comments he made last week “wild and unthinkable.”

RT, which is viewed by many as a mouthpiece of the Kremlin and has been criticised for disseminating a steady stream of Russian propaganda and disinformation to justify the invasion of Ukraine, suspended Krasovsky from his role hosting the political talk show Antonyms.

During a broadcast last week, he joked about sexual assault and suggested that Ukrainian children who refer to parts of Ukraine under Russian control as “occupied” should be killed.

RT’s chief editor, Margarita Simonya, called Krasovsky’s comments “disgusting” in a statement posted to her Telegram channel Sunday.

“For now, I’m stopping our collaboration, as neither I nor the rest of the RT team can afford to even think that any of us are capable of sharing such a wild thing,” she wrote, adding that she expected him to “explain what kind of temporary madness” inspired the outburst.

Krasovsky, one of a number of Russian media figures who have been placed under Western sanctions since the war began, attracted global attention in 2013 when he was fired from a late-night Russian television show after coming out as gay on air. After accusing Russian lawmakers of creating a culture of fear for gay people, he managed to reinstall himself at the center of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine and was appointed as RT’s director of broadcasting in 2020.

The latest rebuke stemmed from an interview segment with Russian fantasy writer Sergei Lukyanenko, who recalled that Ukrainian children told him in the 1980s that their country was occupied by the Russians.

“Throw them in the river where the currents are strong,” Krasovsky responded, adding that they should also be thrown into houses and burned to death.

Krasovsky went on to say that Ukraine “shouldn’t even exist” and joked about Russian soldiers receiving accolades for raping older Ukrainian women.

His comments triggered a searing backlash across social media, with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, accusing him of inciting genocide.

“Ban RT worldwide,” Kuleba wrote in a Twitter post Sunday that included a link to the program. “Governments which have still not banned RT must watch this excerpt,” he added.

The Investigative Committee of Russia, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, said Monday that it was investigating Krasovsky’s “harsh statements.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.