Free Republic

The President. I have a couple comments, and I'll answer some questions, obviously. This is a trip that I've been looking forward to. I've never been to Germany; I'm looking forward to it. I've prepared a speech to the Bundestag, which is going to be a very interesting opportunity for me to talk about a very important relationship. In my speech I'm going to refer to my trip to Russia as well, about how I view this as an opportunity—my trip to Russia and Germany and France and eventually Italy—as a way to confirm the importance of our relationship bilaterally...

An FBI informant told three congressional committees in a written statement that Moscow routed millions to America with the expectation it would benefit Bill Clinton’s charitable efforts as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed through a “reset” in U.S.-Russia relations, the Hill reported. The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the statement, which was obtained by the Hill, that Russian nuclear executives told him Moscow hired American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide because it would influence the Obama administration and specifically Hillary Clinton.

On January 23, days before Armando Iannucci's new comedy “The Death of Stalin" was due to premiere in Russia, the Culture Ministry revoked the film’s distribution license. Hours before, the movie was screened for a group state officials who roundly criticized it as a mockery of Soviet history. Human rights activists in Syktyvkar have filed a lawsuit challenging the Culture Ministry’s decision to revoke the distribution license... Why sue in Syktyvkar? The region was tightly integrated with the Soviet Gulag, meaning that nearly every family with local roots dating back a few generations suffered directly because of Stalinism. The activists...

Former president George W. Bush said that “there’s pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during a speech in Abu Dhabi Thursday. “Whether they affected the outcome is another question,” Bush added. He called it “problematic” that “a foreign nation is involved in our election system. Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results.” “He’s got a chip on his shoulder,” Bush said about Putin. “The reason he does is because of the demise of the Soviet Union troubles him. Therefore, much of his moves (are) to regain Soviet hegemony.” The...

1. Putin like Gorbachev has entered an arms race with a weak economy that can’t support it. 2. Putin has gotten involved in long-running foreign policy “adventures,” Afghanistan in the case of Gorbachev who ultimately got out of that one and Putin in the case of Ukraine. 3. Putin is prepared to fund all the misfits of the world who are prepared to support him just as Soviet leaders including Gorbachev until the money ran out were prepared to back those of “’a socialist orientation.’” 4. Putin is spending enormous sums on “pompous celebrations and ‘projects of the century’ like...

The news of Russia's birth rate dropping by 10.6 per cent in 2017 to reach its lowest level in 10 years, despite government measures to boost fertility rate has prompted debate online. Former Deputy Premier Alfred Koh lambasts Russian authorities in previous years, for attempting to attribute a birth rate rise to Mr Putin's measures, saying it was due to "a generation of people born during a baby boom under Soviet leader Gorbachev that has reached child-bearing age". Koh argues that the Kremlin should take responsibility for the current situation. In his Facebook post that has had over 700 likes...

On a reporting trip to Gaza, Amman, and Damascus in 1994, I made a habit of asking Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders whom I met the following question: Did they think the Jews had a plan to dominate the world? I’ll never forget the enthusiastic answer of a pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader, whom I met in his doctor’s office in Gaza. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have a copy right here.” And he pulled down from a shelf an Arabic-language copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a response I heard again and...

Lance Armstrong has thrown his support behind the Netflix documentary Icarus, which details the alleged Russian state doping system put in place at the Sochi Olympics. Armstrong has pledged to host a screening of the film on January 6 in New York City. Oscar nomination voting opens on January. (Update: it's been nominated.) Fogel told the Hollywood Reporter that he first learned Armstrong had watched the film when he saw Armstrong's tweet in December, and he was happy that Armstrong responded positively. "He was certainly punished in having his seven Tour titles stripped from him, and this is a subject...

In today’s Russia it is not fashionable to delve too deeply into Gulag history, and 60-year-old Panikarov’s collection is one of just two museums devoted entirely to the Gulag in the whole country. Indeed, even Panikarov himself has a somewhat surprising view: “We should not have one-sided evaluations... “It was fashionable to say bad things about the USSR. Now it is again fashionable to insult Russia. We have sanctions against us. The west looks for negative things.” Panikarov’s views on the Gulag are part of a larger trend. With the Soviet victory in the second world war elevated to a...

Many observers have warned that Putin’s military campaign in Syria may backfire at home. Russia’s 144 million people include about 20 million Muslims; the overwhelming majority are Sunnis. Some analysts believe that these Russian Sunnis will recoil from Russia’s support for Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime and its attacks on Sunni rebels, and from Russia’s effort to lead a coalition of Shiite powers, Iran, Iraq and Syria. If pundits’ predictions were true, Muslims would be more likely to choose the anti-war response and less likely to support Putin’s intervention. But that’s not exactly what we found. ...There wasn’t a consensus among any...

Aina Gamzatova, a 46-year-old woman from Dagestan, has made it official. She wants to run against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the March 2018 election. Some see her campaign - irrespective of its results - as a way to boost the image of Muslim women in Russia and to attract attention to the needs of impoverished, overpopulated and multi-ethnic Dagestan. Her husband, Akhmad Abdulaev, is the Mufti of Dagestan, Russia's troubled province where a confrontation between fighters, clans and federal forces has killed thousands. She belongs to a Sufi order that has tens of thousands of followers and whose leader,...

Why do unfair elections even matter? Putin’s regime represents - “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers. Elections in these polities are often marred by abuses of state power, but they are nonetheless held and can be bitterly fought. It is tempting to disregard the results of such elections because of the extent to which they are manipulated by elites in power. Yet counterintuitively, the level of state control over the electoral process is itself a reason to pay close...

“There is no political opposition in Russia. Parties like the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party are, in effect, sub-departments of United Russia, the ruling party. There is only one power vertical and everyone in politics is in it: some as a back-up plan, just in case, some because they expect preferential treatment. I don’t call myself an opposition. I am just a person of common sense. No one appointed me to my post, I was chosen by the majority in competitive elections. That is why I have more scope to act than government-backed officials. But where I can’t...

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed Russia at the GOP retreat in West Virginia on Thursday, definitively telling Republican lawmakers that Moscow "is not, will not, be our friend." "As long as their government has the values that it has, and as long as it conducts itself the way it does internationally," Haley said. Haley made it very clear that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election but also noted that "there is no reason to think the Russian interference made any difference between who won and lost."

Vladimir Putin today presided over a number of commemorations ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. The German defeat in the 200-day long battle was a pivotal moment in the war and is glorified by Russia as the event that saved Europe from Adolf Hitler and as a symbol of the country's resilience. Putin flew to Volgograd, the current name of the city, where he laid flowers and a wreath at the city's war memorial Mamayev Kurgan, as well as posed with a group of young women dressed in historic...

A fight erupted between communist party members and local municipal politicians in Moscow this week over a proposal to move a statue of Vladimir Lenin. "It was a special unscheduled meeting, we didn’t invite anyone and were very surprised that a whole horde of them had gathered," the RBC business portal cited local council member Dmitry Maksimov as saying. Maksimov reportedly filed a police complaint after suffering a head wound in the incident. The Communist leader Suraikin denied attacking the deputy and accused local authorities of "attempting to insult the entire Soviet past." Footage on state-run television showed Suraikin gesticulating...

The shadiest deal that the Clintons hatched with Russia is called Uranium One. Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul and major Clinton Foundation donor, led a group of investors in an enterprise called Uranium One. On June 8, 2010, Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, announced plans to purchase a 51.4 percent stake in the Canadian company, whose international assets included some 20 percent of America’s uranium capacity. Because this active ingredient in atomic reactors and nuclear weapons is a strategic commodity, this $1.3 billion deal required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States...

Trump did not collude with Russia to win the election. On the contrary, the evidence continually proves it was in fact the Democrats, the passive GOP establishment, the media, and the Deep State which have in fact been the ones exhibiting Russia-style, KGB copy-cat behavior. It was Democrats like Hillary Clinton who gave 20% of our uranium away in exchange for $145 million of Russian oligarch donations to the Clinton Foundation. (And this is just one example. As nobody seems to want to talk about how much money she herself invested in Russian projects and their nascent tech sector.) So,...

Since 2012, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping has consolidated more power than any Chinese leader since at least Deng Xiaoping. This consolidation of power has coincided with a growing cult of personality, which portrays Xi as “the right leader at the right time” for China. Analyses of this cult often make comparisons to that of Mao Zedong...A reexamination of the evolution of the cult of personality around Xi, however, suggests that a far more appropriate point of comparison is with a more recent figure: Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Tellingly, during a meeting between the two leaders in 2013, Xi...

"Vladimir Putin has once again thrown Alexei Navalny in jail because he is afraid of his own people - and what they would do if they were free. Every time he imprisons an opposition leader, it only shows the world just how corrupt and oppressive his regime truly is."