Free Republic

A court on Tuesday sentenced a former senior officer in the National Guard to six years in a prison colony after convicting him of buying equipment unable to protect the bridge which links southern Russia to Crimea, the TASS state news agency reported. TASS said that Colonel Sergei Volkov had purchased two radar-based air defence systems for 395 million roubles ($4.5 million) which were meant to be able to bring down Ukrainian attack drones by suppressing their signal. A military court in Moscow had determined that the equipment - which was also meant to protect a gas pipeline running from...

A senior ally of President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday that any Ukrainian attacks on missile launch sites inside Russia with arms supplied by the United States and its allies would risk a nuclear response from Moscow. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that some Ukrainian military commanders were considering hitting missile launch sites inside Russia with Western-supplied long-range missiles. He did not name the commanders or disclose more details of the alleged plan and there was no immediate reaction from Ukraine to his threat.

Russian patriotic bloggers on Friday poured scorn on President Vladimir Putin's intimation that mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane was blown up with hand grenades while those on board were high on cocaine and alcohol. The private Embraer jet on which Prigozhin was travelling to St Petersburg crashed north of Moscow killing all 10 people on board on Aug. 23, including Dmitry Utkin, co-founder of the mercenary Wagner group, four bodyguards and a crew of three. Putin said on Thursday fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the dead and that investigators had ruled out any external impact...

President Vladimir Putin has ordered Wagner fighters to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state after a deadly plane crash believed to have killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the volatile chief of the mercenary group. Putin signed the decree bringing in the change with immediate effect on Friday after the Kremlin said that Western suggestions that Prigozhin had been killed on its orders were an "absolute lie".

Russia's most senior generals have dropped out of public view after a failed mercenary mutiny aimed at toppling the top military brass, amid a drive by President Vladimir Putin to reassert his authority. Unconfirmed reports say that at least one person has been detained and is being questioned. Armed forces chief of staff General Valery Gerasimov has not appeared in public or on state TV since the aborted mutiny on Saturday when mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin demanded Gerasimov be handed over. Nor has he been mentioned in a defence ministry press release since June 9. Gerasimov, 67, is the commander...

Russia's leading war hawks rallied behind the humiliating decision for Moscow's forces to retreat from the Ukrainian city of Kherson this month, but the commander who argued in favour of the move is now under growing pressure to prove it was worth it. Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed "General Armageddon" by the Russian media for his reputed ruthlessness, on Nov. 9 recommended Moscow's forces quit Kherson and the west bank of the River Dnipro where they were dangerously exposed. Surovikin, a 56-year-old veteran of wars in Chechnya and Syria who has been decorated by President Vladimir Putin, argued the withdrawal, completed two...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians opened the door to Vladimir Putin staying in power until 2036 by voting overwhelmingly for constitutional changes that will allow him to run again for president twice, but critics said the outcome was falsified on an industrial scale. Official results published on Thursday, after 100% of ballots had been counted, showed that the former KGB officer who has ruled Russia for more than two decades as president or prime minister had easily won the right to run for two more six-year terms after the current one ends in 2024. That means Putin, 67, could rule until...

The Russian air force grounded its entire fleet of Sukhoi-27 fighter jets on Thursday after a fatal crash near Moscow which aviation sources told Russian agencies looked like the result of some kind of technical failure. Viktor Bondarev, the head of the air force, ordered the country's fleet of the twin-engined fighter jet grounded until the reasons for the crash had been determined, Russian agencies reported. Russia is believed to have over 300 of the fighter jets in service. The United States complained in April that one of them had made aggressive manoeuvres near a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the...