Free Republic

The threat of security problems and “provocations” in the wake of the Skripals' poisoning means they should flee now and move to the “wild east” of Russia. A campaign aimed at bringing home young people studying in the UK and other Western countries has been launched by an official group representing former Soviet states. They are told that there are excellent opportunities in the far east of Siberia instead of London - but the plan has been mocked on social media. In recent years some of Russia’s brightest students, as well as high-flying financial and technological graduates, have gravitated to...

"Trump denied the claims during his conversation with Comey, telling him that “‘the hookers thing’ is nonsense,” according to the memo, but that “Putin had told him ‘we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.’”

"This is an adult and, moreover, a man who for many years has organised beauty contests. He socialised with the most beautiful women in the world. I can hardly imagine he rushed to the hotel to meet our girls of lower social responsibility -even though they are the best in the world, of course."

It's always interesting when two apparently unrelated elements of the political world collide to shed light on a third, also seemingly unrelated element. That's what happened last weekend during the missile strikes against Assad's nerve-gas network. For the past several months, speculation has been rampant in political and military circles concerning new superweapons developed by the Russian Federation, presumably for use against its Main Enemy, the U.S. Information on these systems did not emerge by accident or by means of intelligence efforts. It was intentionally released by the Russians themselves, for purposes that would not be immediately evident to anyone...

Ambassador Nikki Haley is under fire over being “confused,” according to the White House, about when or if new sanctions on Russia are coming. Ann Coulter wasted no time in saying the most outrageously stupid thing she could muster. Worse than Putin?

In Defense of Christians (IDC), the nation's leading advocacy organization for Christians and religious minorities in the Middle East, condemns the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. On Saturday, April 6th, Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics reported that more than 40 people were killed in a chemical attack on Douma, a rebel-stronghold in the Eastern Ghouta region of Damascus. "Attacking innocent civilians in Syria with chemical weapons is a gross violation of humanity and utterly immoral," stated IDC's Executive Director Philippe Nassif on April 12th. "All parties who were involved must be...

Russian investigative journalist Maksim Borodin of Yekaterinburg has died of injuries sustained on April 12 when he fell from the window of his fifth-floor apartment. Borodin, 32, died on April 15 in a hospital without recovering consciousness. Officially, his death was being investigated as a suicide. A Sverdlovsk Oblast police spokesman said it was "unlikely that this story is of a criminal nature."

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday voiced alarm over the growing “alienation” between Russia and the West, stressing the need for dialogue as post-Cold War tensions peak. Speaking to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Steinmeier said last month’s poisoning of a former Russian spy in England, which Britain and its allies blame on Moscow, was “a very serious incident”. “But we should be at least as worried about the galloping alienation between Russia and the West, the consequences of which stretch far beyond this case,” the former foreign minister said. Moscow vehemently denies involvement in the nerve agent poisoning of...

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”...

It was a star-filled night in Chechnya's besieged capital of Grozny. The snow crunched under my feet as I walked with the Chechen rebel commander away from the warmth of our safe house. When we entered a bombed-out neighborhood 15 minutes away, I put the battery in my Iridium satellite phone and waited for the glowing screen to signal that I had locked on to the satellites. I made my call. It was short. Then the commander made a call; he quickly hung up and handed me back the phone. "Enough," he said, motioning for me to remove the battery....

A district court judge ruled the Syrian regime — and specifically its ruler, President Bashar al-Assad — are liable for the murders of three Americans by al-Qaeda because of the regime’s massive support for the terrorist group’s branch in Iraq. In addition to those three Americans, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, Iraqis and others have been killed or injured due to Assad’s sponsorship of al-Qaeda and other jihadists. The lawsuit was filed by the families of Laurence Michael Foley, a U.S. diplomat in Jordan assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2002; Staff Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, killed in Iraq in 2004...

"We have proof that chemical weapons were used last week, at least chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad," Macron said during an interview on France's TF1 television. Macron added that he was in daily contact with US President Donald Trump and that they would decide on their response "at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective." The French leader, who had made the use of chemical weapons in Syria a "red line", said one of his aims in Syria was to "remove the...

Despite the panic and hysteria in the media, the Russian and American military commands in Syria continue to cooperate to ensure that any attack by one side against Syrian targets will not lead to the loss of life by soldiers of the other country. American military personnel who constantly coordinate their actions with the Russians just as the Russians do with the Americans on the territory of Syria have taken all measures so that any American strike will not inflict casualties among Russians. Only if the Russian forces confirm that there are no Russian soldiers present at a place the...

The highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Eastern Bloc says the Soviet Union orchestrated an anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda campaign in the Middle East four decades ago -- and the effects of the effort still reverberate. The Middle East was a key battlefield in the Cold War, and Moscow spent considerable resources courting Arab states in the region and vocally backing the Palestinian cause. Humiliated by the defeat of the Soviet-backed Arab states in their 1967 war against Israel, Yuri Andropov devised the operation to discredit the Jewish state and present Zionism as "Nazi-style racism" while at the...

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Donald Trump’s attempts to talk to Russia through a barrage of tweets on Wednesday, and warned that the US president risked worsening “an already fragile situation.” "We don’t do Twitter diplomacy. We are proponents of a serious approach,” Peskov told the media in Moscow. “We still think it is important to avoid steps that could harm what is already a fragile situation.”

It seems that Russia, in its search for a suitable method of collective suicide, has decided to compensate for America's supposed superiority in anti-missile defense systems with an enormously expensive one-sided arms race. Russia decided to create missiles capable of almost 100% penetration of not just the existing, but also any future missile defense of the United States.  Of course, the Pentagon only shrugged – they know perfectly well about Russia's tiny military budget.  Well, if Russia wants to go bankrupt unilaterally, so be it.  Trump's administration will not interfere.  It will even help. The fact is that the nuclear missiles currently in service...

Russia's ruble experienced its biggest one-day fall for over two years on Monday and stocks in major Russian companies also slid, as investors reacted to a new round of U.S. sanctions targeting some of Russia's biggest tycoons. The impact of the new sanctions could threaten Russia's fragile economic recovery, which was only just beginning to take hold after the first major wave of sanctions against Russia, introduced in response to Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Shares of Russian Companies Tumble Following U.S. Sanctions Russia's currency plunged to its lowest level since November last year, trading at 60.24 to the...

Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Monday that the Israeli army's use of force against Palestinians at protests inside the Gaza Strip was unacceptable. Palestinian demonstrations, which began on March 30, have been dubbed "The Great March of Return" of refugees and their descendants to ancestral homes now in Israel. In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry criticized what it described as Israel's "indiscriminate use of force against the civilian population." Earlier on Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry accused Israel of carrying out airstrikes against a Syrian air base on Sunday following an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced what he labeled “the excessive demonization of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. His methods may have been harsh by Western standards, but few can quibble with the results.” These “results” included the deaths of 15 million to 30 million Soviet citizens through executions, labor camps, avoidable famines and making the treaty with Germany that unleashed WW II. “Few critics take into account the poverty and backwardness of the country Stalin inherited,” Putin contended. “Bringing the Soviet Union into the modern era required sacrifices. The millions who died in the Gulag would have died eventually, regardless....

The Trump administration announced new sanctions on seven Russian oligarchs and 17 top government officials on Friday, in a move that targets Vladimir Putin’s inner circle for “malign activity” including meddling in the 2016 US election and other aggressions. The new economic sanctions represent the most forceful action yet taken by the Trump administration against Putin’s circle. “The Russian government operates for the disproportionate benefit of oligarchs and government elites,” said the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. “Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities.” Mnuchin...