Free Republic

During the chaos in Russia this weekend, much of the nation’s leadership effectively disappeared. It remains unclear if Vladimir Putin is even in Moscow, though state spokesmen insist that he has remained “working inside the Kremlin.” The target of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted coup attempt, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, similarly pulled a vanishing act on Saturday. But today he finally reappeared, showing up in Ukraine to perform an inspection of some of Russia’s troops, making sure that the media was there to cover his performance. The Defense Ministry published a video showing Shoigu meeting with high-ranking Russian Army officers at a...

This seems to be an increasingly common theme on a global scale. We are continually warned that the United States is running low on arms and munitions and may not be prepared to supply Taiwan if China invades. We are similarly assured that we need to continue spending vast amounts of money we don’t have to arm Ukraine or they will likewise run low and be unable to fend off the Russians. But now their enemy in that conflict is making an identical claim. Vladimir Putin told a group of pro-war bloggers this week that his country is running very...

Russia is still cutting deals with China, Iran, and North Korea to make sure they don’t run out of missiles and ammunition, but there’s one thing that they can’t import in any significant numbers. What they’re running short of are soldiers. Moscow doesn’t publish precise figures, but one recent estimate puts the Russian death toll in Ukraine at more than 70,000. Others suspect that the true figure is closer to 100,000. And then there are the tens of thousands who survived but were too grievously injured to return to combat. With the ranks thinning so badly, Vladimir Putin has launched...

A wind energy company named Avangrid has been in the process of developing a massive offshore wind farm called the Commonwealth Wind project, working with the support of the state of Massachusetts for several years. When completed, it was to be a 1,200-megawatt energy source. A second offshore project from Mayflower Wind was to produce an additional 400 megawatts. But now, the companies behind both of these projects have asked the state to put the plans on hold. The reason given was that the projects are “no longer viable” under the current conditions and they will be unable to move...

Despite all of his public bluster, is it possible that Vladimir Putin is getting just a bit desperate in his bid to find some sort of path to something he could call a “victory” in Ukraine? One hint could be found in the fact that he twisted Lukashenko’s arm to pull Belarus into the fighting at this late stage of the game. But another indicator of Russia’s military reaching the bottom of the barrel popped up this week. Yesterday, Tyler Rogoway from The War Zone sent out this alert on social media. It seems that Russia is “modernizing” some of...

At this point, the United States has sent more than $17 billion in cash and military aid to Ukraine for that nation’s fight against the Russians. The United States has been far and away the largest, most generous patron of Ukraine’s government of any of the allies who are supporting this effort. But this has dragged on for quite a while now and it is long past time to begin seriously discussing the obvious question. How long are we supposed to keep this up? In fairly short order, the money we’ve sent to Ukraine will more than double the annual...

Yesterday, Medvedev posted a rant on his messaging app (for some reason) in which he accused the United States and NATO of plotting to “break up” the Russian Federation. But he warned that even if the alleged plot succeeded, the result would be “doomsday,” and any country attempting it would be engaged in a “chess game with Death.” And I think we all know what that means. (Associated Press)

It looks like my colleague Jazz Shaw first wrote about Dan Price back in August of 2015. Price is the Seattle CEO Gravity Payments who made a lot of news when he announced he’d be paying his employees a minimum of $70,000 each and cut his own salary from just over a million dollars a year to $70,000.Dan became a mini-celebrity for these efforts. Esquire called him a “folk hero for the age of inequality.” In a separate story published in 2016, Esquire reported that Price’s background and motive weren’t as pure as it may have appeared.In a TEDx Talk...

By yesterday, it looked like the battle for Mariupol was over in all but name when Zelensky sent word to his own troops to get out if they were able. The steel mill where the fighters, along with thousands of civilians had been holed up has been mostly shelled into rubble. Finally, the wounded were removed on stretchers and a significant number of the remaining troops turned themselves over to the Russian forces. Reportedly, many of them were loaded onto buses to a prison camp in Russian-held territory. But there are still thousands of Russian prisoners of war being held...

With the primary season getting underway, it’s also time for the traditional round of newspaper endorsements. Few people seem to believe that those endorsements hold anywhere near the influence they did fifty years ago, but some traditions have to be maintained, I suppose. That’s not the case at the Philadelphia Inquirer, however. They are publishing their picks for the Democratic races as they normally do. But instead of listing endorsements for candidates in Republican primary races in Pennsylvania this week, the editorial board of the Inquirer decided to publish a long-winded explanation of why they refused to endorse a single...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed up in Kyiv this weekend in a “secret, surprise” visit to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She was joined by several members of Congress, including Adam Schiff. Zelensky was quick to welcome the delegation and thank the United States for being his greatest supporter during the Russian invasion. There were plenty of photo ops and speeches, though nothing much of substance appeared to come out of the meeting, aside from assurances that America would continue to send funds and supplies to the Ukrainian forces. Pelosi did take the opportunity to call Vladimir Putin a...

To say that the United States’ foreign policy situation has shifted dramatically in the past couple of years would be an understatement. While the world is largely united in its opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s individual relationships with some countries have grown increasingly rocky even as former rivals in other parts of the world seem to be on the mend. For one example, look no further than the recent rapprochement between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Just this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia for the first time in five years, taking meetings with both Crown...

Yesterday we learned of a Long Island woman who was arrested for illegally vaccinating a teenager in her home without the prior consent of the teen’s parents. Making the story even stranger was the fact that the woman, Laura Russo, was not a medical professional of any sort and she was not qualified to perform such a medical procedure. Initially, little was known about either the woman or the student, but now a few more details are emerging. Perhaps the most interesting one is that the woman, who has been charged with a Class E felony, is a teacher at...

Mysteries intrigue the human mind. Things you don’t understand or can’t see. Mysteries draw you in, books, TV shows, real-life, even lingerie. You want to see, to understand.I don’t mean stupid mysteries like algebra. I mean scientific stuff. Our country has just gone through a messy pandemic year full of scary scientific mysteries that government folks were afraid to admit they really didn’t understand (or, that they did, and why).So, they pretended to understand this new mysterious virus and what to do about it. We were afraid, so fell for their charade of dictums–two weeks to flatten the curve. Then,...

The definitive answer as to what happened in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office is still far from definitive. In the short period of time between Friday evening and Sunday morning, the bizarre saga of (former) U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman has taken more twists and turns than an Olympic luge run. Yesterday I puzzled over how Berman’s dismissal by either Donald Trump or Bill Barr (depending who you ask) was handled in such an apparently slapdash fashion. In less than a day, we went from Barr announcing the Berman was resigning to Berman saying he wasn’t. Then Barr said Trump...

While everyone is focusing on the Presidential race and the electoral college this year, some GOP strategists are getting a bit nervous about the Senate. Of the upper chamber seats up for grabs, the GOP is defending more of them that look potentially vulnerable if Democrats get some momentum going. This is probably even more important than the question of who wins the White House. If Donald Trump manages to lose his bid for a second term, a GOP Senate majority is the only thing that would act as a check on the new Democratic president’s agenda, whether that...

I’m sure you wanted to kick off your Wednesday morning with some great news, but I’m afraid this isn’t it. As you likely know by now, the big debate raging in Washington and all across the country at the moment is over the question of whether we’re “testing enough” to pin down the spread of the novel coronavirus. The President says we are. Speaker Pelosi says we aren’t. That’s just politics as usual and you could insert virtually any other topic of debate in place of the virus and get the same result.But as we rush to test as...

While some may be taking the latest news out of Venezuela as a hopeful note, it may actually spell the beginning of the end of any hope that dictator Nicolas Maduro will be removed from power. We’re hearing from representatives of self-declared interim President Juan Guaido that he is now willing to enter into “negotiations” with Maduro, an option he had rejected as recently as last week. They already have representatives meeting in Norway where they’re trying to find a way out of the current quagmire. And with public support for Guaido’s calls to replace Maduro appearing to decline, it...

Yesterday we talked about an Associated Press report claiming that the United States has been in secret discussions with some of the most senior members of the Venezuelan socialist party. The suggestion was that we were offering some of these thugs assurances that they wouldn’t be prosecuted for anything if they turned their backs on dictator Nicolas Maduro and hastened his exit from office. Well, now that the cat is out of the bag, both Maduro and President Trump are confirming that the story is true. (AP) President Donald Trump said Tuesday his government is talking to “various representatives” of...

In the scientific community, there is still a great deal of energy devoted to “listening” for evidence or hints of intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations out among the stars. Most of you are probably familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and their decades of work in this field. They’re still at it and, in fact, are upping their game with a new generation of laser sensors. These projects drew fresh attention after the discovery of Tabby’s Star and the frantic speculation over whether or not some ancient civilization had built a Dyson Sphere around their own sun. This has led...