Free Republic

Pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said on Sunday he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be "sham" with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin's military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his...

LONDON (Reuters) - Russia on Thursday shifted its stance over the bombing of a Ukrainian hospital in the city of Mariupol, with a mix of statements that veered between aggressive denials and a call by the Kremlin to establish clear facts.Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy said three people including a child had been killed in the bombing on Wednesday, and rejected Russian assertions there had been no patients there."Like always, they lie confidently," said Zelenskiy, who has accused Moscow of waging genocide in the war it launched two weeks ago.In the face of worldwide condemnation there were rare signs of inconsistency...

Voters in Mississippi on Tuesday will decide a U.S. Senate special election runoff marked by racial controversy and capped by a last-minute visit by President Donald Trump to shore up the beleaguered Republican incumbent. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white former state lawmaker who was appointed to the seat in April, is still favored over black Democrat Mike Espy in the reliably Republican state, which has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1982. But she has been engulfed in a political storm since a video surfaced showing her praising a supporter at a Nov. 2 public event by...