Free Republic

For many, the sudden seizure of buildings in Donetsk was as unexpected as the arrival of masked, armed soldiers in Crimea six weeks ago. In eastern Ukraine, as in Crimea, a majority of the population is ethnically Russian. In many regions, such as Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk, loyalties to Russia also run strong, and distrust of the new government in Kiev runs deep. And as in Crimea, many ethnic Russians voice fears – exaggerated or not – of discrimination at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists who helped topple the previous government. However, until this weekend, eastern Ukraine had appeared calm....

With Nato assessments that there are some 40,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border ready to move at a few hours' notice, the heightening war of words between Moscow and Kiev raises a genuine prospect of conflict. If Russia requires a pretext to move into eastern Ukraine, then many of the elements of that narrative are already in place. But what of the Russian military's capabilities? What can be deduced from what we have seen so far of Russian operations in Crimea? Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC), a group specialising in Russian military affairs,...

Ukraine's state security service (SBU) said they arrested a Russian woman accused of being a saboteur sent by the Kremlin to stir up unrest and violence across the border. Maria Koleda, 22, was detained in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, from where she was overseeing the setup of armed subversive groups and spying on Ukraine's defence forces deployed at the border with Crimea, the SBU said. Koleda was also allegedly involved in this week's clashes in the city of Mykolaiv, during which pro-Russian protesters stormed the regional administration offices. The SBU said the woman, who visited Ukraine nine times...

Estonia is a little nation of 1.3 million people, which was made a member of NATO in 2004. Estonia was once a province of the Soviet Union. It has a Russian minority that is 25 percent of the population, and Russia has vowed to protect ethnic Russians if they are subjected to mass violence by the Estonian majority. Did NATO make a wise decision to bring in itty-bitty baltic nations that were once part of the Soviet Union? I can understand the importance of preventing the Soviet Union from being brought back into existence. But the lives of American troops...

(Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron's handling of an expenses scandal engulfing one of his ministers has put him under pressure before European elections, threatening his Conservative party's already clouded electoral outlook. Cameron, whose party risks being beaten into third place in next month's European Parliament elections behind the anti-EU UK Independence party (UKIP), has stood by Maria Miller, Britain's minister for culture, since a parliamentary report ordered her to pay back wrongly claimed expenses last week. But the media and public backlash against Miller shows no sign of abating despite Cameron's efforts to end it. Many of his own...

Why Poland Loves Ukraine ... For Now MARCH 28, 2014 Slawomir Sierakowski Eastern Europe, which beginning with Poland is celebrating its 25th anniversary of freedom from Communism, has suddenly awakened from a beautiful dream about the end of history. No less an authority than Adam Michnik, the legendary Polish anti-Communist dissident, recently announced that 2014 marks the end of the best period in Poland’s history in three centuries. We are entering uncertain times: In contrast to Eastern Europe’s foray into independence after World War I, no close intraregional alliances were formed in the aftermath of 1989; rather, each country placed...

COPENHAGEN (The Global Edition) – The Copenhagen Zoo has killed several of its staff members early this morning in order to create four new job openings, the Zoo public relations sector reported. Officials of the Zoo say that the four members of the staff were humanely executed after being put to sleep with a lethal injection, and then skinned and chopped up while visitors crowded around and the meat was fed to the lion population.

In an Arutz Sheva interview Sunday, Rabbi Michoel Rosenblum, Director of EU Jewish Buildings, summed up the financial effects of the newly emergent European anti-Semitism by saying that “it's not cheap to be a Jew in Europe.” "The exorbitant costs of security, besides the regular functions of a Jewish organization today – you're taxed with another 30-40% of just wasting time with security and financing and all of that,” Rabbi Rosenblum explained. The rabbi spoke to Arutz Sheva at the Rabbinical Center of Europe conference in Budapest, Hungary.

LONDON — President Obama spent Wednesday in Brussels talking up the importance of the security relationship between Europe and the United States, but it is considered unlikely that Russia’s seizure of Crimea will prompt increased European military spending at a time of economic anemia and budget cuts. NATO and the European Union regard the Russian move in Ukraine as a wake-up call, a reminder that hard power can easily trump 21st-century assumptions about Europe as a sphere of trade, international law and cooperation. Despite the newly militant tone, NATO members will continue to spend paltry amounts on defense, experts say....

Going forward, every NATO member state must step up and carry its share of the burden. — President Barack Obama, March 26, 2014 On Wednesday, addressing an assembly of young Europeans, President Obama issued a challenge. Faced with a resurgent Russia, he said, and in view of the shaky global economy, Europeans must spend more on defense. His sentiment is well founded. Let’s be clear: EU defense spending is woefully inadequate. Excluding Britain, France, Germany, and perhaps Italy, the EU states are fundamentally incapable of full-spectrum operations. And the military of America’s greatest ally, the British, is being forced...

President Obama has made two major gaffes so far during his Europe trip. After falsely claimed that Kosovo held a UN-assisted referendum on self-determination, he then wrongly said that Georgia was not being considered for NATO membership. Speaking on Kosovo yesterday, Obama said : "...Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organised not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbours. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea." But none of it came close to happening in Kosovo either, as Milos Subotic, the International Relations Officer...

Speaking at the press conference after the EU-US summit yesterday the US President wrongly suggested that Georgia "is not currently on a path to NATO membership". In fact the country has been on the path to membership since 2008. At the North Atlantic Council in Bucharest that year the attending Heads of State and Government agreed the following statement: "NATO welcomes Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that they will become members of NATO." Former Georgian Ambassador to London Giorgi Badridze, told Breitbart London: "President Obama's remarks could hardly have come at a worse time –...

here’s an old joke about what the newspaper you read — remember reading newspapers? — said about you: The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country, the New York Times is read by the people who think they run the country, the Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country, the Boston Globe is read by people whose grandparents used to do a damned fine job of running the country, the San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure whether there is a country or if anybody’s running...

The magic is gone, and the adoring crowds in Berlin 2008 must seem only a distant memory. While spring has arrived for everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere, Barack Obama is entering his winter. As his presidency implodes in a cloud of Obamacare incompetence and foreign policy blunders, even the Europeans who once adored him have caught on to what an empty suit Barack Obama is.

Holy cow, folks! SMH!!!!!! This is sooooo unbelieavable. He has NO credibility!!

UKRAINE-WAS BARACK OBAMA ACCIDENTALLY RIGHT? By Tom Adkins Not again! World nasty boy Vladimir Putin waltzed into the Ukraine, waded through a war of words and snatched Crimea. But where is America? No anger? No troops on the ground? No saber rattling? The world is shocked! Where's the USA? When thugs attack, America always rides to the rescue. Doesn't President Obama know the script? Instead, Barack Obama has that impotent deer-in-the-headlights look, as another nasty dictator drives a stake into his tattered foreign policy. It’s Obama’s fault! Right???? No. Not this time. Sure, Obama’s ankle-grabbing geopolitical diplomacy has entered legendary...

[SNIP]...Putin, as the entire administration keeps reminding us, is premodern. He should be, but is not, shamed when John Kerry, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama variously proclaim that he is a 19th century dinosaur, or has lost the good will of the enlightened West. Again, we are told Putin worries about this; but I think he is about as concerned as were Norsemen like Eric Bloodaxe, who lost all the respect of the monks along the English coast that he so freely raided. While Putin was making a premodern fool out of himself, blustering and bullying, and lying...

A week ago, in the St. George's Hall in the Kremlin, Russia's elite cheered and wept as Vladimir Putin announced the re-annexation of Crimea. Seven in 10 Russians approve of Putin's rule. In Crimea, the Russian majority has not ceased celebrating. The re-conquest nears completion. In Eastern Ukraine, Russians have now begun to agitate for annexation by Moscow. Ukrainian nationalism, manifest in the anti-Russia coup in Kiev, has produced its inevitable reaction among Russians. While praising the Ukrainians who came out to Maidan to protest peacefully, Putin said that those behind the decisive events "resorted to terror, murder and riots....

Today, it has been reported that British state-run hospitals, under the direction of the National Health Service, incinerated dead children lost in abortions and miscarriages in order to heat hospitals. The babies were discarded like so much clinical waste, to be burned. http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2014/03/24/nhs-horror-aborted-babies-incinerated-as-clinical-waste-in-uksome-used-to-heat-hospitals-n1813630?utm_source=TopBreakingNewsCarousel&utm_medium=story&utm_campaign=BreakingNewsCarousel Ladies and gentlemen, this is satanic. This is lower than the practices of most Third World countries. They kill children with abandon in Sudan, where government-funded militiamen use guns and slashing weapons to slaughter non-Arabs in the Darfur region. Yet even in Sudan, they do not incinerate the children as fuel. You see, even radical Muslim fanatics...

Europe hasn’t changed all that much, at least in regards to its feelings about Jews, according to Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, former head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “They don't like to hear that,” Gersetenfeld told a Haifa audience last week. […] Gerstenfeld, a historian with an expertise in European Jewish history, along with Itay Reuveni of NGO Monitor, was discussing the issue of anti-Semitism at the Midrasha Leumit in Haifa. That Europe hates Jews even now, decades after the Holocaust, he said, as is clear from the many anti-Semitic caricatures appearing in European newspapers, the ongoing anti-Semitic attacks...