this is bbc world news. i'm shaun ley. the headlines... the number of refugees who've fled their homes since since the start of the war in ukraine reaches 10 million. in ukraine, the bombardment continues. russia bombs a school in mariupol where around 400 people were sheltering. president zelensky says moscow has committed war crimes in the city. the ukrainian president has also suspended 11 pro—russia political parties and ordered the broadcast of a single stream of television news. now it's time for the media show.

hello, as governments around the world race to sanction associates of vladimir putin, the british media is turning its attention to the role russian oligarchs have played in public life. this week, an edition of panorama aired allegations about the source roman abramovich�*s wealth. at the weekend, the sunday times reported that newspaper owner evgeny lebedev was made a peer despite the concerns of the security services. and the gossip sites are all over the gilded lifestyles of the oligarch kids and their swanky homes around the world. but why is it only now that the mainstream press has put the oligarchs in the spotlight? what has stopped them before? just some of the big questions for my guest today. they are, paul caruana galizia, who is a generalist behind —— journalist behind a new podcast for tortoise media called lebedev: lord of siberia. adam bienkov is political editor at the byline times. laura kayali is tech corresponded at politico. natalia antelava is a journalist and co—founder of the news site coda story.

and lionel barber was editor of the financial times from 2005 to 2020. he is now an investor in the new european. and lionel, just if we start with you, the last time you were on the media show, you had just been to interview vladimir putin. what chance today, do you think, that a journalist could get an audience with that president? extremely limited. under 1%. may be in seven weeks if this is over, he they might do something, a staged event. but a one on one like the financial times did in 2019, very unlikely. and by the way, it did take five years to get there, to the kremlin for the post midnight meeting. and when you did get there, what did you talk about? we talked about everything from the failed assassination of sergei skripal, which he dismissed, mr putin. to the relations with china, the intervention in syria and notably two stories

that came out. one was about when he declared under questioning the idea that liberalism, he said it was obsolete. he really felt the west was in decline, decadent, preoccupied by secondary questions of gender fluidity. he also said that his risk appetite had gone up because he who does not dare to risk, he said, quoting a russian proverb, does not get to drink the champagne. do you recognise the man you see now, do you think he has changed? i see him a lot more puffy. he looks like he's put on a bit more weight. the effects of two years isolation during covid has got to have had some effect.

i think the circle has gotten narrower and i can exclusively reveal that when we sat down, the table was a bit shorter than the one he is currently using. i was going to say you were not at the end of a very long table. it was the same room, though. with all of the great russian historicalfigures. there was a question about why evgeny lebedev seemed to have such good access to borisjohnson. paul, you have explored this question. take us back to the beginning. in 2009, alexander lebedev bought the london evening standard for £1. his son become publisher. and then a year later they bought another one.

tell us a little bit more about that. so we released the podcast before the sunday times released their article. it was commissioned in december. back then we thought it was going to be a colourful profile of evgeny lebedev and his father and how they use the papers to build friendships with celebrities. and politicians as well like borisjohnson. it was kind of an influence machine that they ran with these newspapers. but of course the reporting changed character in february when russia invaded ukraine. we started looking more closely at other aspects of this family. when it when it comes to the owning of these newspapers. lebedev senior owned various bits of media in russia. is that more than just a business

decision and how did you read the way they bought into the british media? it is much more than a business decision. as a kind of strategy survival for oligarchs. you need more than wealth — you need some way of buying influence and promoting yourself as a liberal western leading figure. that's what a lot of oligarchs did. in russia alexander bought a large chunk of a paper with gorbachev. and he also bought a smaller tabloid. there is some irony in that tabloid because in 2008 it reported allegations that a putin was having an affair with a young gymnast and in a few days the tabloid was shut down. it was within a couple of weeks of that that alexander and his son started the process of purchasing

the evening standard. the then owner of the newspaper was looking to off—load it because it was a losing enterprise. i think it is also significant that the deal was set up by another newspaper editor. it is a story about how closely bound up all of these people are with the oligarchy. i'm going to bring in adam now because he published a big piece on saturday called thejohnson lebedev letters. what did you find? i first became aware of the relationship of about ten years ago in 2012 when i spotted on a register that he declared a trip to italy paid for by lebedev.

i thought it was very curious at the time. it had not been announced in any way. i started to ask questions about it, but it was not really picked up by anyone at the time, even when later it appeared that this was an annual enterprise. he kept being sent out there and several years after that when we learned about his trip in 2018 when he ditched his security detail to attend a party. it was not picked up by many other news organisations so i was interested in it and did some freedom of information act requests. i just wanted to see what the relationship was between boris johnson and lebedev. and i've got some correspondence from their time. it follows on from what paul was saying, it kind of gives you the nuts and bolts of how this influence operation works and they work both ways.

by buying the evening standard, that is the only paper covering the mayoral election and so for borisjohnson it was important to have a good relationship. and he talked about the pet projects that he would be thrilled to have lebedev�*s support for. and then it works both ways. he wantsjohnson to back a new arts festival. the purpose of the festival is to transform russia's global perceptions in london. what is interesting is lebedev in these minutes it is just —— suggested he's going to reach out to the kremlin to secure funding for it. let me just read you what evgeny lebedev has said

in response to all of this. he wrote i am not a security risk to this country which i love. my father a long time ago was a foreign intelligent agent of the kgb, but i am not some agent of russia. he obviously adds as well, i have called on president putin to end the invasion of ukraine in the most public way possible. paul, i wanted to bring you in because mr lebedev is now a peer sitting in the house of lords. the sunday times said he was deemed a security risk in the process and borisjohnson ignored that. we know that really just a few weeks within borisjohnson being elected prime minister in december 2019, he decided to make lebedev a member of the house of lords, it was a personal nomination. we know through documents we've got that the house of lords, the semi—independent body,

part of the cabinet office, that can vet nominees, was chasing lebedev for information or information that is routinely asked for. the difference in his case is that they turn to the security services for advice. it was only on the 17th of march that they finally got that advice, and they met to discuss it in a committee room in parliament and were so disturbed by it, they immediately wrote to the prime minister saying that they felt deeply uncomfortable about this nomination — would you please reconsider or would you consider an alternative which they propose.

and he did indeed end up becoming a peer. that is right. two days after that report was discussed, evgeny lebedev met with borisjohnson in downing street. and borisjohnson pushed his name through. evgeny lebedev took his seat later that year. lionel, you would have watched the entrance of the lebedevs into high society — what did you make of it at the time and what do you think about it now? i had lunch with evgeny lebedev when he asked me about what he should be doing as a proprietor as well as with the evening standard. i also met the father in moscow in 2008 on a trip where he was very much the man in jeans with the very expensive leather shoes. nothing wrong with that, but you could feel ex kgb. we need to be clear about a few

things here and i do not want to discredit the reporting, but context please. first of all, proprietors, that is what they do. they want to ingratiate themselves with the establishment and they often get things like knighthoods. even editors. and prime ministers use patronage. johnson is appalling in this respect. i am not surprised that he wanted to give him a peerage. the lebedevs were very proud of the money they raised for a cancer foundation. they had gorbachev in the evening standard newsroom. putin despises gorbachev. he holds him responsible for the collapse of the soviet union. it's a strange thing to have that kind of close relationship.

third, i would draw a distinction between the father and the son. the son always struck me as a bit of a hedonist. i didn't go to the parties... ijust think that we need to be careful about adopting a kind of mccarthy—ist attitude towards all russians and also understand, who was going to buy it? newspapers are not football clubs. the lebedevs put in money and from what i could tell and i have had conversations he did not feel the heavy hand of evgeny lebedev on his shoulder, the editor when he was making editorial decisions. and i have spoken to other editors who have said the same. that's the point.

i think we need to look very clearly. one other thing about the intelligence services. the sunday times has done great reporting, made a big deal of the fact that the boss of m16 had raised objections to evgeny lebedev attending lunch with the editor. i went to lunches at m16 once a year, but i would never have dreamt of bringing the proprietor. i'm the one who is making the decisions about who comes to my lunch, and i think that was why he did not want evgeny lebedev. we should say that we invited evgeny lebedev to join us on the programme, but we have not heard back. but someone who has worked

with him is natalia. you made a film for bbc newsnight back in 2012. mr lebedev had secured an interview. what was he like? he was very polished and very underwhelming, i would say. he came across as a rich man's son. i did not hang out with him. we had one meeting ahead of time. we did not start off very well because he approached newsnight and it was part of his transformation from a party boy into a much more serious figure in the british public life. he approached newsnight with a suggestion for a collaboration and they rang me up and asked if i wanted to do a collaboration who had secured a incredible

interview with europe's last dictator, the belarusian president. who doesn't normally do interviews. i thought it was... i had no desire to do a collaboration with evgeny lebedev. he was the son of a russian oligarch. to quote putin himself, he once said in one of his famous press conferences, he said once a spy always a spy. whether or not that is the case, that was the father not the son and we are talking about the son. yes, but evgeny lebedev had just taken over the independent and it was very clear about his reputation, him trying to come across as a different kind of figure and i knew that he had

gone to central afrian republic on a reporting trip and also cutting jobs at the independent. it will be good to hear a clip from it. we're going to hear about his expectations for the interview. one interesting thing about this is i don't know how it is going to go. i think it is the first one that i have done where i really do not know what to expect. apparently according to his press secretary he is up for a fight. as you were saying, he was the boss of the independent, not a journalist. i wondered what you made of him as a interviewer in that situation. he was terrible, he was terrible! it was a four—hour interview. it went on and on forever, he asked terrible questions and very weird questions. there was a bizarre moment

in the interview when he turned to lukashenko and said, what do you think about group sex? there was an awkward pause and lukashenko looked at me and i had to kind of move in. he secured the interview, and you were along for the ride to film it. i think we will move on from there. and move away from evgeny lebedev and back to the question that i asked at the start of the show — why is it only now that we are reading investigations into russian influence into the uk and i'm thinking particularly about roman abramovich. lionel, you will know about the legal perils of writing about oligarchs.

has the risk of litigation from london's top law forms suppressed reporting about them? i am not carrying water for the financial times, but i can assure you that we did write about influence of russians in london, and i still have letters from the law firms threatening us. this was literally putin's... hung up by my boots. we've seen the names of the law firms. we heard this and the testimony just this week. crucially, the problem is this is a very interesting question about the word oligarchs. some of these very rich people sent very tough letters insisting they were not oligarchs because this refers to the late 1990s

where some people became very, very rich very quickly, gaining control of natural resources in the 1990s when we basically had the wild west out in russia. some of them have since become great philanthropists. the crucial point is some of... i think you've got to distinguish between groups of oligarchs. some have become great philanthropists. they've given money. tate modern... some of them are ukrainian, some of them own a football club like mr abramovich. he also happened to be a governor in a siberian province. he does give money to charity. he does not sponsor art museums. there are others who are much darkerfigures. and i interviewed one of them in russian. these are different

categories of people. bottom line, the law is not in favour of investigating, public service investigations because the balance of libel. this is what was being said in the foreign select committee this week. the government was told that the london lawyers apply psychological pressure to journalist. do you recognise that? i do, actually. not on the level of some others because i was never threatened. but in general a lot of the most aggressive libel lawyers are centred on london and they target journalists notjust in this country, in this jurisdiction, but overseas. people from india on behalf of president modi for example.

you tried to write about the children of oligarchs? yes, it is never easy with the oligarchs. i suspect that there is a lawyer listening to this conversation as well. i'm just going to change direction now because i want to pick up on something we talked about a few weeks ago which is the crackdown on russian backed channels. laura is tech correspondent at politico based in paris. it turns out blocking russian news channels is not as simple as the eu hoped for. why not? it was not very easy legally because it was a political decision to ban those media

from european soil. it was unprecedented, so the first question that needed to be answered was what legal grounds do you use to forbid media organisations from broadcasting in europe? and of course these are not your normal media organisations, but they use journalists with actual press cards and press credentials. so what happened is that european leaders realised that the legal framework was not going to cut it. and so they went down the economic sanctions route. but rt is challenging that in front of eu courts and we will see if that is legally solid or not. is the onus on the tech companies to block these channels voluntarily? they were in the scope of the sanctions, so the online

channels and telegram channels, youtube, facebook, all of that was in the scope, so they have been removed. it was legally binding for them to do so. but we are seeing is mirror websites which are websites that copy the content of banned websites but with different urls. you can still find rt on a website that has a very fringe conspiracy theory type content. i think a few people have got very rich, but i will not mention them on this programme. they appear on these kinds of shows and being apologists. having an english reporter,

an english voice, on rt which has a tiny audience i don't think is that influential. i do think there was important influence in other areas particularly on brexit. and in america... i'm sorry i'm going to have to stop you there. because we have run out of time. i want to say thank you to all of our guests. the media show will be back at the same time next week. for now, thank you for watching. goodbye. it as another fine day today, brought by a large area of high

pressure. 0n the satellite picture, you can see the clouds rotating around this big high, just fringing on western parts of the uk, and also a bit of cloud rotating into parts of the south—east and east anglia, so not completely sunny everywhere, but sunny for most of us. temperatures today will have maxed out at around 10 degrees on the north sea coast, still chilly in that wind in the east. around western parts of the country, no higher than 13. western parts of the country, no higherthan 13. it western parts of the country, no higher than 13. it will be a chilly evening this evening, and a frost developing tonight. here is the forecast. clear skies and light winds across many central areas of the uk. it could be cloudy for a time along the north sea coast, out towards the west. you can see the blue colours, that's where the frost is, and even in central london barely above freezing. tropical plymouth around six celsius. here is the forecast for the next few days. it will become much warmer widely across the uk as this milder air sets in from the south and push as a

way that colder air, which we have had of the north sea. so much warmer atmosphere spreading in across the uk. they're coming all the way from portugal and spain, maybe even northern africa. so here is the forecast for tomorrow. lots of sunshine around. a little bit of cloud building in the south, so sunny spells, rather than clear blue skies. decent temperatures, 16 in london, better on the north sea coast, still chilly in northern scotland. 8—10 c. from tuesday, it is proper mild, warm even current of air coming from southern climes with temperatures up to 20. we have already had 20 on saturday in western scotland, but i think the high teens, up to 20 celsius more widespread on tuesday. 20 celsius in london. 17 or 18 into the north west of england and the high teens in central parts of scotland. on wednesday, spot the difference. another mild,

so, the forecast into the week ahead, the fine weather continues. a little dip in the temperature as we head into the weekend, but still decent enough. goodbye.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. our top stories... the number of refugees who've fled their homes since since the start of the war in ukraine reaches 10 million. everything is ruined and i don't know will stay my house in safety? i don't know when i can come back to ukraine. ukraine's politicians warn the mass exodus of people from their homes will have a worsening affect on the deepening food crisis in the region.

the world will face the shortage of all these produces