Free Republic

In Ukraine, since February 2022, martial law and a decree on general mobilization have been in force. Men between the age of 18 and 60 are now forbidden to leave Ukraine. Ukrainians are being offered the opportunity to buy bogus death certificates on the the darknet to avoid mobilization, a Sputnik correspondent found. "We make a complete package for you to get compensation from the state for a murdered relative! So you can not go to war and get money. The cost of the service: $10,000," the authors of the announcement promise. In the description, sellers say that customers will...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - US Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft, which was approaching Russian airspace over the Norwegian Sea on Friday, made a U-turn after Russia’s MiG-31 jet took off, the Russian Defense Ministry reported. According to the ministry, Russian airspace control detected an air target approaching the country’s airspace on Friday, and a MiG-31 took off to identify the air target and prevent violation of the state border. “The crew of the Russian fighter jet identified the air target as a US Navy P-8A Poseidon base patrol aircraft. When the Russian fighter approached, the foreign military aircraft made a U-turn from...

The European Union is preparing to launch formal talks on possible Ukrainian accession into the bloc, despite dire warnings by senior officials that the EU might not survive enlargement economically, and lose what’s left of the pan-European project’s political cohesion. Ukraine in its current state is corrupt to the core and absolutely ineligible to join the European Union, former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has said. "One mustn’t make false promises to the people of Ukraine who are up to their necks in suffering. I am very angry about the presence of some voices in Europe who are telling the...

Western leaders have long fostered the self-serving myth that NATO is an organization solely for the mutual defense of its members. The corollary is that other nations therefore have no legitimate reason to fear the most powerful military alliance in history. After all, it is an association of peace-loving democracies. NATO is not a purely defensive alliance, and its members are not peace-loving democracies. The operational expression of the myth is most evident regarding relations with Russia. According to the dominant narrative (that a sycophantic news media obediently circulate) is that NATO’s addition of new members in Eastern Europe during...

The White House gave the Kiev regime a set of conditions for receiving aid from the West. Ukraine is required to conduct a series of sweeping reforms concerning its courts, security service, Defense ministry, and economy. Earlier this week, Deputy White House National Security Adviser for International Economics Mike Pyle sent a draft list of reforms to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, as per Ukrainian media. The document was also forwarded to the multi-agency Donor Coordination Platform, a group of organizations including the EU, G7 governments, and the main international financial organizations, including the International Monetary...

Western media reported that Russian Black Sea Fleet commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov was killed in Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol, citing Ukrainian officials, without verifying the information. Ukraine used several British-sourced Storm Shadow cruise missiles to target the HQs building of the Russian Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea last Friday. Russian Black Sea Fleet commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov has turned up alive and well, taking part in a Defense Ministry board meeting alongside Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Tuesday. Sokolov's appearance follows claims in dozens of Western media outlets quoting Ukraine's Special Operations Forces claiming that he had been killed in last...

With Ukrainian forces reportedly suffering a level of amputations reminiscent of WWI, a New York Times proxy war propagandist is spinning amputees as sex symbols and painting their gruesome injuries as “magical.” After 18 months of devastating proxy warfare, the scale of the depletion of the Ukrainian military is so extensive that even mainstream sources have been forced to concede the cruel reality. On August 1, The Wall Street Journal reported that “between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians” have “lost one or more limbs since the start of the war.” What’s more, the outlet notes, “the actual figure could be higher”...

The BRICS founding member recently started purchasing oil from the UAE using local currencies as part of a wider push towards de-dollarization. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has started asking local banks to drop the US dollar in transactions with the UAE and instead use the Emirati dirham or Indian rupee, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. "The RBI has asked banks to encourage clients and corporates to initiate INR-AED trades gradually, instead of using the dollar," a treasury official at a private bank told the British news outlet. Indian foreign exchange dealers were informed of this new...

Niger’s coup leaders believe they must first rid the region of the French and American military and then boot out their fifth columnists in the military, the media and the and the NGOs. Niger’s recent coup follows similar coups in nearby Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea, each of which was led by military leaders opposed to the presence of French and U.S. occupation troops stationed there to ensure NATO’s continued economic rape of their respective homelands. The Sahel, the region of Africa housing these four (and other coup-prone) countries, has been assailed with a number of economic factors, which have...

BUDAPEST (Sputnik) - The United States’ demand to hand over the data of 900,000 Hungarian citizens living abroad is unprecedented and unrealistic, Hungarian Deputy Interior Minister Bence Retvari said on Sunday, adding that Budapest would not share the information to avoid putting its citizens in danger. The main reason why Hungary has not agreed to hand over the data is security concerns, he added. "Such a request for someone to hand over the data of several hundred thousand of its citizens is unprecedented, countries do not do this. Every country protects and safeguards the data of its citizens with legal...

The IRGC Navy has said that its AI-powered cruise missiles would be able to turn American aircraft carriers in the region to “metal scrap”. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy has inducted hundreds of reconnaissance and offensive drones as well as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ballistic missiles among other state-of-the-art equipment, state media reported on Saturday. The IRGC has said that the new ballistic missiles have a range of 300 to 1,000 kilometers. The other equipment received by the IRGC Navy includes radar-equipped cruise missiles and command systems, intelligence-gathering systems and electronic warfare equipment. The domestically-manufactured equipment has been co-developed...

There was an air of magical realism in the daylong visit to Kiev last Friday by the EU’s policy commissioners comprising the executive branch of the group — the so-called College — led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. At the end of the day in Kiev on Friday, during a joint press conference in Kiev with President Volodymyr Zelensky, all that the EU’s super bureaucrats would promise was that “Ukraine’s future is in the EU.” However, as the BBC reported, “Typically, it takes years for countries to join — and the EU has declined to set...

Defence sources warn Britain will be unable "credibly" to offer as many troops as NATO allies would expect to a major new force structure being drawn up by the alliance to bolster its defences. At the same time, the sources said a "refresh" of UK defence policy - that was meant to inform the spending plans of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - could be delayed until after the March budget because an initial draft failed to reflect sufficiently the transformed security environment in Europe, where a land war is raging. "It is not very joined up...

We’ll assume you’ve recently had your heart broken if you plan to spend Valentine’s Day crying into a glass of red wine and watching Bridget Jones’ Diary while eating ice cream straight from the tub. Even if that isn’t your current plan, we’ve all had a bad ex at some point in our lives....... ..... The San Antonio Zoo is offering a special Valentine’s Day greeting to all of your ex-partners who are living rent-free inside your head. The zoo will name a cockroach after your not-so-special someone for a pittance of USD$10 And if that isn’t a cold yet...

Something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years of the Cold War has awoken, Matthew Ehret writes. It feels like today’s world is spinning quickly out of control. Fear of nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO has increased to a fever pitch and something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years of the Cold War has awoken. A strange form of insanity has swept across the collective west as the US Congress infuses billions of dollars of more lethal aid to a regime in Kiev which a smiling Senator Lindsey Graham has said Kiev “will fight...

Central European countries like Croatia, Hungary, and also recently Austria too are beginning to emerge as voices of reason in the West after their de facto New Cold War bloc’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine over the past year failed to defeat that Great Power. They rightly realize how counterproductive this NATO-led campaign has been for their collective interests, ergo why they’re urging restraint and even an outright reversal of policy at this point in time. Croatian President Zoran Milanovic is unexpectedly giving Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a run for his money when it comes to being the...

For a country constantly chest-thumping about the size of its economy, the United States is remarkably over-reliant on one form of "export" – war. For decades, the American-led political West used proxy wars to hurt its geopolitical adversaries. While most of these weren't a direct existential threat to US rivals and were relatively limited in scope, recent years brought a major shift to this strategic approach. Washington DC has become more bellicose than at any point in its history, aggressively attacking the very heartlands of its opponents. In the case of Russia and China, the only reason America isn't directly...

It has been almost a year since Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine. For many of our friends in Eastern Europe, I’m sure it feels like a lifetime. Still, it’s easy to forget that this conflict really began in 2014, when separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk declared their independence from Kiev. (Then, as now, the separatists were backed by Moscow.) That same year, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine’s core territory last year, Kiev and its allies have been adamant on one point: Whatever else happens in the course of this war, they will not...

A U.S. government body held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.” The participants urged the United States to give more support to separatist movements inside Russia and in the diaspora. They proposed the independence of numerous republics in the Russian Federation, including Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Dagestan, as well as historic areas that existed centuries ago such as Circassia. This is far from the first time that hawks in Washington have fantasized about carving up foreign countries. During the first cold war, the U.S. sponsored secessionist groups inside the...

A German-made tank, which Berlin once dubbed one of the best in the world, has had its shortcomings embarrassingly exposed on the battlefield in Syria. Photos from the Turkish military operation dubbed 'Euphrates Shield', which began in August 2016, show the charred remains of one of the Leopard 2 tanks which was reportedly blown up with mines. The images - taken from an ISIS video published in January 2017 - show the tank with its turret completely blown off. Other pictures from the same conflict show Leopard 2s standing idle in ditches and snow after being severely damaged. The 1970s-built...