Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States almost doubled its aid for displaced Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh and Myanmar, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced on Monday as she pushed for U.N. investigators to brief the U.N. Security Council on the crisis. “The military are at fault, the fact finding mission came out and gave clear examples of what’s happened,” Haley told reporters on Monday as she left a ministerial meeting in New York on the sidelines of the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders. “These weren’t terrorists. This was the military that did this to them....

The Russian Communist Party has announced it will form a coalition government with the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) in three regions where Kremlin-backed candidates suffered rare gubernatorial election defeats over the past week. Incumbents from the ruling party in the Far East Khabarovsk region and central Russia’s Vladimir region lost gubernatorial runoffs to LDPR on Sunday. Candidates from the Communist Party and A Just Russia will compete for the governor’s seat in the Siberian republic of Khakasia on Oct. 7 after its governor’s withdrawal from the race. “We will now form a coalition government in Khabarovsk, Vladimir and Khakasia,”...

With support for the Kremlin waning, repression is all it has left. General elections this month have revealed that the Russian public is frustrated, uncertain about the future and electrified by protest sentiment. Kremlin candidates struggled to win their gubernatorial bids, while high school and college students—people who haven’t even started working yet — took to the streets to protest plans to raise the pension age. Political analysts chalk this situation up to Kremlin errors. They believe that domestic policy chief Sergei Kiriyenko has loosened the political rules too much and has invested too heavily in the spectacle of the...

Next month, Europe’s leading budget airline will begin regular flights from Ukraine to a host of EU destinations. This is the latest milestone in a Ukrainian aviation boom that is seeing additional routes announced on a weekly basis and record passenger numbers at airports across the country. Each new flight serves to broaden Ukrainian horizons and anchor the country more firmly within the wider international community. Meanwhile, there has not been a single direct flight between Ukraine and Russia since October 2015. The changes in Ukraine’s air travel industry are just one of the many ways in which the country...

An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans. The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday criticized Russia for its failure to cooperate with the U.S. on the world stage despite overtures by President Donald Trump to “develop a relationship” with the Kremlin. “They have not proven helpful in the Ukraine, in Syria,” Pompeo said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview set to air Sunday. The State Department last week imposed sanctions on China’s Equipment Development Department for its purchase of Russian combat aircraft and surface-to-air missile equipment. On Saturday, Pompeo pointed to those economic penalties as evidence of the Trump administration’s efforts to “push back...

Connections between the Kremlin and international terrorism extend back for decades. The KGB helped develop modern terrorism. It provided weapons to terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, helped devise aircraft hijackings during the 1960s, and promoted the concept of suicide bombings against both military and civilian targets. According to KGB defectors, the FSB successor has continued to sponsor terrorists such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, who trained in Russia in the 1990s before joining Osama bin Laden. During its proxy attack on Ukraine, Moscow supplied the missile system to separatists who shot down a Malaysian Airlines jet, killing nearly 300 civilians. The West has...

Putin’s dialing down of the rhetoric is an effort to mask his intentions. He — Russia — still has the same foreign policy interests in Syria as he did before the plane was shot down, and those aren’t going to change anytime soon. When journalists asked him about the much more hostile statement of his Defense Ministry, which also vowed a retaliatory response, Putin stated clearly that it was “fully coordinated” with him (of course it was). He defined what ‘retaliatory’ meant. “The retaliatory measures will be directed above all to boosting the security of military men and installations in...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday showed off his marksmanship by testing out a new Kalashnikov sniper rifle and hitting the target more than half the time. Russian state television showed Putin in goggles and earphones crouching as he fired the silver rifle at the Kalashnikov company's shooting range outside Moscow.

Electoral authorities in Russia's Far Eastern Primorye region annulled the result of a disputed gubernatorial runoff vote, after the country's top election official said it was marred by "serious violations." A total of 12 members of Primorye's election commission on September 20 voted in favor of the annulment of the result of the closely contested vote in the region, where the Communist Party cried foul after the Kremlin-backed incumbent surged ahead at the end of the ballot count. One election commission member voted against the proposal. It is the first time a runoff has been annulled in Russia since 1996,...

Recent intelligence information revealing dramatic progress in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program has given a new urgency to U.S. and British efforts to build international support for war with Iraq, according to Iraqi opposition leaders interviewed by Insight in London. The information, from recent defectors and other sources working with the broad-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), indicates that Baghdad has made "a recent breakthrough" in production of the fissile material needed to produce the bomb. It was buttressed on Sept. 24 when the British government released an "unprecedented" white paper based in part on classified intelligence information on Iraq's weapons of mass...

In March, State Department veteran and former adviser to Barack Obama, Frederic Hof, bid farewell to public life with a stunning admission. Amid a confession regarding his failure to prevent the expansion of the Syrian civil war into a regional crisis, Hof laid the blame for that all-consuming conflict (as well as a notable uptick in Russian aggression) at the feet of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. The administration sacrificed Syrian civilians and American credibility for the mistaken notion that Iran required appeasement in Syria as the price for a nuclear agreement,” Hof wrote. Today, with 500,000 dead, millions...

A senior adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama says that Russia has some reasonable concerns about U.S. missile defense plans. Russia has strongly opposed U.S. missile defense plans in Europe. Moscow says the system could undermine the deterrent of its vast nuclear arsenal. ... However, Obama's coordinator for weapons of mass destruction policy, Gary Samore on Friday said that Russia's objections are legitimate as Washington and Moscow pursue nuclear reductions.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner claimed during the U.N. General Assembly on Monday that a former Obama administration official attempted to convince Argentina to “provide the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear fuel.” The claim was seemingly overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s high-stakes dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kirchner claimed Gary Samore, former White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, visited Argentina and suggested the nation provide Iran with nuclear fuel in 2010, two years into Obama’s presidency.

It is impossible to evaluate events in Russia today without understanding the mysterious series of bombings in 1999 that killed 300 civilians and created the conditions for Vladimir Putin to become Russia’s dictator for life. The bombings changed the course of Russia’s post-Soviet history. They were blamed on the Chechens. In the wake of initial success, Russia launched a new invasion of Chechnya. Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, was put in charge of the invasion and his popularity soared. Six months later, he was elected president. On July 14, 2016, I filed a request for documents on...

Russia has blamed Israel for the downing of one of its military planes in Syria and threatened "retaliation." An Ilyushin IL-20 aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defense missiles in what has been called a "friendly fire" incident. The Russian defense ministry has claimed that Israeli jets were attacking nearby targets and purposely "used the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defenses."

President Donald Trump publicly rebuked German Chancellor Angela Merkel on July 11 for Germany’s decision to buy a massive amount of gas from Russia. “I think it’s very sad,” he said. "Germany is totally controlled by Russia,” he later said, “I think it’s a very bad thing for nato and I don’t think it should have happened.” Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 are key components of Putin’s plan to tighten his grip on nations in Eastern Europe that used to be part of the Soviet Empire. Since these pipelines travel directly from Russia to Germany, they enable Putin to...

A global uranium cartel is forming to monopolize uranium sales There is, today, collusion among known, and unknown, principals of a cartel cooperating to monopolize the global uranium market, in a way not-unlike how DeBeers cartel controls the diamond market. This emerging uranium cartel is forming as a confederacy with no allegiance to any State or Rule of Law. It is evolving from globalists for the benefit of globalists.

In wooded northern Russia, near the Finnish border, archaeological digs by a patriotic historical group are unearthing controversy. The Russian Military History Society, which was created by the Kremlin, says it is seeking the remains of Soviet soldiers who died when the region was occupied by Nazi-aligned Finns during World War II. But human rights activists allege the organisation is trying to cover up Stalin-era repressions in the Sandarmokh forest, in Karelia. “The search for the remains of soldiers from the Second World War on the site of mass executions by the NKVD...looks like an attempt to manipulate memory," Memorial...

The trilateral summit in Tehran between the presidents of Turkey, Iran and Russia was one of the most unusual parades of international diplomacy yet. It was televised live. Let’s remember the scenes: All who watched it saw how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blundered and how Russian President Vladimir Putin ridiculed him. Then it was a rare — if not unique — case of international diplomacy where a trilateral partnership considered detrimental to the interests of the West displayed signs of failure on a burning international issue.What has had the West — the transatlantic security system — worried for some time is NATO-member Turkey’s partnership...