INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
air strike on a maternity hospital in southern Ukraine, Interfax reported Friday.Alexander Nevzorov, a former MP who has worked with
"deliberately false" information about Russia's March 9 shelling of a Mariupol maternity hospital on social media.Nevzorov's posts, which
criticized the Russian military for the strike, "were accompanied by unreliable photographs of civilians affected by the shelling," Russia's
Investigative Committee said in March.Russian officials both dismissed the attack as being staged by Ukraine and justified it by claiming
the hospital was being used by extremist Ukrainian forces and that all medical personnel and patients had long been gone.Officials also
baselessly described the pregnant women pictured fleeing the shelling as crisis actors.The law against "fakes" about the Armed Forces,
passed just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, punishes those found guilty with up to 10 or 15 years in
prison.Critics say the law is being used to silence anti-war voices and reporting that doesn't follow the Kremlin's narrative about what it
intended to signal to journalists in Russia that "the regime is not going to spare anyone, and that any attempts to comprehend the criminal
war will end in prison."Russian authorities have carried out an unprecedented crackdown on independent and critical voices since the start
those labeled to stifling bureaucratic requirements.AFP contributed reporting.
