Conor McGregor taunted his former friend and Russian native Artem Lobov during a weekend of chaos in Moscow, triggered by the Wagner mercenary mutiny.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troops were just 120 miles from Moscow before he called off the uprising after a deal brokered with the Kremlin.
The image of Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on Moscow has been dented by images of the private army leaving Ukraine to seize a military headquarters in a southern Russian city.
READ MORE: UFC star Conor McGregor mourning the death of his aunt
McGregor couldn't resist a pop at his former teammate Lobov, who tried to sue the UFC star after claiming he played an important role in setting up Proper 12 Irish whiskey.
The Dubliner tweeted: "Civil war in Russia and Artem Lobov still in Ireland." McGregor later deleted the tweet.
The former two-weight champion sold his majority share in the whiskey company in a deal worth almost €550million in 2021, with Lobov filing a lawsuit claiming that he was entitled to a percentage of the amount McGregor pocketed from the deal.
However, Lobov was unsuccessful, with a judge ruling in McGregor's favour.
Lobov then took further action by taking McGregor to the high court in Dublin in what he called “a concerted social media barrage” against him.
McGregor tweeted and deleted an audio message in which he chanted that Lobov "is a rat".
Lobov sought an order that would have required McGregor to remove any of the allegedly defamatory posts on social media. In the ruling from Mr. Justice Garrett Simons, he said the court was not satisfied that McGregor's tweet in which he called Lobov a "rat" was defamatory and didn't go beyond “vulgar abuse.”
The judge labelled the comment as "a series of pejorative terms" which were applied to Lobov and was "not necessarily even the most insulting". The judge added that "no reasonable member of society would attach any significance" to the tweets McGregor posted about Lobov.
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