Ukraine crisis: Russian news agency deletes victory editorial

A Russian news agency has published and then deleted an article prematurely praising Russia’s success in invading Ukraine.
It applauds Russian President Vladimir Putin for solving the Ukraine “problem”, saying that “Ukraine has returned to Russia” through military action. It suggests the author anticipated a rapid victory and the piece was published prematurely.
The article, published by the state-owned RIA-Novosti news agency on Saturday (26 February) and described by Christo Grozev of fact-checkers Bellingcat as “extremely shocking, even for Kremlin standards”, was quickly deleted from its website.
Other Twitter users called it Russia’s “victory celebration”.
However, it still remains visible on the Internet Archive website, and at the time of writing it’s also visible on a regional page of Russia’s government-owned Sputnik news site.