Free Republic

As President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has pursued enemies abroad, his intelligence operatives now appear prepared to cross a line that they previously avoided: trying to kill a valuable informant for the U.S. government on American soil. The clandestine operation, seeking to eliminate a C.I.A. informant in Miami who had been a high-ranking Russian intelligence official more than a decade earlier, represented a brazen expansion of Mr. Putin’s campaign of targeted assassinations. It also signaled a dangerous low point even between intelligence services that have long had a strained history. “The red lines are long gone for Putin,” said...

Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely never the elite Soviet spy that the world has been led to believe, an investigaton by the German news outlet Der Spiegel has revealed. -snip- according to Der Spiegel's report, the majority of Putin's work was actually limited to "banal" administrative tasks. Citing one of Putin's former colleagues at the KGB's Dresden office, it says his "work consisted primarily of endlessly reviewing applications for West German relatives' visits or searching for potential informants among foreign students at Dresden University." The report says that Putin is rarely mentioned in Stasi — the name of the...

News of a recent alleged assassination attempt on Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, raises the question: what kind of Russia might emerge after him? It is tempting to believe that, if Putin were killed, or otherwise removed from power, for example in a palace coup, Russia would shake off its dictatorial shackles, normalize its relations with the West, and advance down the democratic road. Such thinking is mistaken. History suggests there are slim prospects of Russia doing so. The surest guarantee that Russia will not reform along democratic lines is the power of its security and intelligence services. At key junctures...

The 15-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl was taken one warm morning last October. Like everyone else in Kherson, a city on the estuary of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine, Yevheniia's family were still adjusting to life under Russian control. Putin's tanks and troops had poured into the city seven months earlier, soon after the invasion of Ukraine began. Now there were checkpoints, military police, rumours of Russian brutality; of women being raped. Ukraine was fighting to get the city back and there was a constant risk of shelling. Few people went out after 5pm. In the apartment where the teenager lived...

For more than two months, Revolver has worked to expose the true nature of the 2020 presidential election. Powerful forces in the national media, academia, intelligence services, and the courts are fighting to prevent America from holding an ordinary vote on November 3. Instead, they plan to pull off an Eastern Europe-style “color revolution,” where institutional forces are used to bring about the intended outcome regardless of what the law says or what the public wants, while giving the whole process a gloss of democratic legitimacy.Harassment, censorship, and intimidation of Trump supporters by any means necessary is a key element of...

Orthodox monks who've been ordered out of a monastery in Kyiv refused to leave on Wednesday, as a deadline to vacate the complex expired. The dispute over the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, Ukraine's most revered Orthodox site, is part of a wider religious conflict playing out in parallel with the war. The monks using the property belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has been accused of links to Russia. But the site is owned by the Ukrainian government, and the agency overseeing the property notified the UOC earlier this month that, as of March 29, it was terminating the lease.

As the Internal Revenue Service seeks to bolster the ranks of its weapon-carrying Criminal Investigation unit, a former special agent described the inner workings of the division and said its key function is “to put the fear of God in people” and intimidate Americans into tax compliance. Former IRS Special Agent Robert Nordlander told Accounting Today, in a wide-ranging interview published on Feb. 20, that while most Americans have a sense of what IRS tax audits look like, the work of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit is shrouded in some mystery. Dubbed “gun-toters,” the armed special agents in the...

President of Russia Events Structure Videos and Photos Documents Contacts Search president President Presidential Executive Office State Council Security Council Commissions and Councils February, 2022 News Transcripts Trips About President Events Security Council meeting The President held a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council at the Kremlin. February 21, 202218:30The Kremlin, Moscow At the Security Council meeting. 2 of 17 At the Security Council meeting. President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues. We are meeting today to discuss the current developments in Donbass. I will briefly remind you how it all started and how the situation has developed...

Russia has held at least 6,000 Ukrainian children - likely many more - in sites in Russian-held Crimea and Russia whose primary purpose appears to be political re-education, according to a U.S.-backed report published on Tuesday. The report said Yale University researchers had identified at least 43 camps and other facilities where Ukrainian children have been held that were part of a "large-scale systematic network" operated by Moscow since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The children included those with parents or clear familial guardianship, those Russia deemed orphans, others who were in the care of Ukrainian state institutions before...

The mood among Russia’s special forces and the FSB began to change dramatically in the fall, when Russian troops abandoned Kherson, suffering the latest of many humiliations for the Russian army. ''' We’ve known most of our contacts in Russia’s special forces and the FSB for years, and none was particularly religious before the war. Now a wave of mysticism has descended on them; the apparent trigger being a growing understanding that the war is not going to end anytime soon. '''

Bishop Strickland reacts to FBI whistleblower’s bombshell report on surveillance of traditional Catholics‘[A]ttacks of violent aggression are antithetical to what it means to be a radically committed traditional Catholic,’ Bishop Strickland told LifeSiteNews.TYLER, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Tyler, Texas spoke out Wednesday in response to news that the FBI is beefing up its surveillance of so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics” in Virginia, saying that “[d]eeply committed Catholics are the last people the authorities should be concerned about.”On Wednesday, former FBI agent turned whistleblower Kyle Seraphin released an eight-page document indicating the federal law enforcement agency is tracking...

FBI whistleblower releases docs showing agency is surveilling ‘Radical’ Latin Mass CatholicsThe memo cited a 2021 study from the anti-Catholic Southern Poverty Law Center to justify the FBI's monitoring efforts.RICHMOND, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — A document released by an FBI whistleblower indicates the agency plans to intensify its “assessment” and “mitigation” of “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” over the next 12 to 24 months due to alleged concerns that “white nationalists” are increasingly making common cause online with attendees of the Latin Mass.The bombshell 8-page memo was released by former FBI agent turned whistleblower Kyle Seraphin on UncoveredDC Wednesday. The report, written by...

FBI Internal Memo Warns against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday. Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com. “In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on...

“The western territories of Ukraine will be safe if they temporarily come under the protectorate of the Polish state.” Polish Prime Minister Matteusz Morawiecki.

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill celebrated the feast of Theophany in the Epiphany Cathedral in Moscow on Thursday, where he offered a rather stark warning in his homily: “Any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” Beginning his homily for the feast, the Russian primate emphasized that the meaning of the feast is that the grace of God appeared not just for the Jews, not just for the Apostles, but for all men, as St. Paul says (cf. Tit. 2:11),” reports Patriarchia.ru.The words of God are immortal, he continued, as evidenced by the fact that the Orthodox...

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

The Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled today that the bill calling for the forced renaming of churches or religious organizations associated with organizations in Russia is in line with state constitution. Although it has been legally registered as the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church” for 30 years, there have been attempts at least since 2018 under President Poroshenko to forcibly rename the UOC as the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” although these attempts have been repeatedly blocked by Ukrainian courts. It is well known that renaming the Church is simply laying the foundation to seize churches and outright ban the Ukrainian Church,...

VOLOGDA, Russia -- Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country’s military into Ukraine in late February, Vladimir Rumyantsev began posting and even broadcasting news from independent media about the invasion from his apartment, highlighting many of the atrocities Russian troops were alleged to have committed. Rumyantsev, who lives in Vologda some 500 kilometers north of Moscow, says he is no admirer of Putin or his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He says he began his posts and broadcasts because Russians needed independent information -- much of which contradicts the official narrative -- “to evaluate the actions of the authorities.”...

The clandestine campaign is behind many unexplained explosions and fires that have hit strategic or prominent facilities in recent months, says US expert Jack Murphy, an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran. Separately other European intelligence services have allegedly been 'running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help', as has Ukraine. His claims follow as a new fire struck a shopping mall in Krasnodar region, in southern Russia, the latest in dozens of such incidents. It comes as Putin issued another chilling warning to the West on Christmas day. In Ukraine today, air raid sirens have been going off...

On this date in 1953, Stalin’s feared minister Lavrenty Beria was shot — finally on the receiving end of the cruelty he had administered to countless Soviet citizens.Lavrenty Pavlovich was, like Stalin, a Georgian peasant, albeit one generation younger. He won his way into Stalin’s confidence from the 1920’s, and in 1938 replaced Nikolai Yezhov as head of the KGB predecessor NKVD. Yezhov did much of the bloody work of the Great Purge, and was himself in turn purged. The cunning Beria must have taken note. Though his initial project was to clean up the excesses of the Yezhovshchina —...