Free Republic

For decades, Russia has suffered a brain and youth drain: According to federal statistics agency Rosstat, more than 300,000 people left the country in 2016. A recent survey conducted by the state-funded pollster VTsIOM shows that 1 out of 10 Russians want to leave the country. Notably, one out of four of those questioned in the poll could name a relative or acquaintance who had moved away from Russia in recent years. Young Russians were especially keen to move: Among those aged 18 to 24, almost one-third (31 percent) of respondents said they wanted to leave the country. VTsIOM said...

A battle for the future shape of Russia's education system is under way. Not only is the Kremlin increasing its control over what it considers the correct version of the country's history, there are also signs of a gradual ideological turn towards promoting the glorification of Joseph Stalin. In 2015 the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was celebrated in grand style. During that time, a larger than usual number of Stalin monuments was erected in several cities especially in south-western parts of the country. A 2014 law passed by the Duma introduced a criminal penalty for...

President Trump on Monday blamed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for a tight special congressional election last week — and Kasich fired back by tweeting a GIF of a laughing Vladimir Putin. “The very unpopular Governor of Ohio (and failed presidential candidate) @JohnKasich hurt Troy Balderson’s recent win by tamping down enthusiasm for an otherwise great candidate. Even Kasich’s Lt. Governor lost Gov. race because of his unpopularity. Credit to Troy on the BIG WIN!” the commander-in-chief tweeted.

The number of Russians residing and working in the Czech Republic has been steadily growing in recent years. Today Russians are the fourth strongest foreign minority in the country, after Vietnamese, Slovak and Ukrainian nationals. In the last decade their number rose from 23,000 to 37,000. For young Russians, Prague is an attractive city free of the constraints of the Putin regime, and a good place for business and entertainment. The language barrier is easily surmountable due to both nations speaking a Slavic language. However there is one barrier that is harder to cross and that is the stigma of...

Former British spy Christopher Steele lobbied a senior Justice Department official on behalf of a Russian oligarch before and during his work on the controversial opposition research dossier which accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia. Steele repeatedly advocated on behalf of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in his communications with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele asked Ohr to monitor the status of Deripaska’s newly issued U.S. visa, informed Ohr that he was circulating a sensitive intelligence briefing that cast Deripaska as independent of the Kremlin, and sent information on behalf of the oligarch’s lawyer about a dispute...

Baltimore, Md., Aug 9, 2018 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- Four years of fighting in eastern Ukraine have led to “the biggest humanitarian crisis on the European continent since the end of the Second World War,” according to the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv called on the international community and the Catholic Church not to neglect the crisis in Ukraine. He made the plea during his keynote address at the Knights of Columbus convention in Baltimore on August 7.Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian conflict has taken the lives of more than...

We should know by now, shouldn’t we? Pay little heed to Donald Trump’s words and judge him by his actions. So after the rambling tweets and that embarrassing showing in Helsinki – the one when he stood beside Vladimir Putin and said he accepted the Russian president’s word that Kremlin goons had not interfered in the 2016 election (Mr Trump later said he misspoke) - now we have the concrete action. These come with dramatic consequences, from downgrading diplomatic relations to cutting off almost all exports and imports. It represents a clear statement of intent by this administration. And sends...

The Trump administration is hitting Russia with new sanctions punishing President Vladimir Putin's government for using a chemical weapon against an ex-spy in Britain, U.S. officials told NBC News Wednesday. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on a determination that Russia violated international law by poisoning the former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in March, officials said, a decision that was announced Wednesday afternoon by State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert. Although the U.S. joined European countries in publicly blaming Moscow within days of the attack, the Trump administration had never issued the formal determination that triggers automatic sanctions...

In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, many American leftists — including quite a few members of the Democratic Party — regarded the Soviet Union through a pink-tinted filter of earnestly held ideals. The U.S.S.R. was a “socialist paradise,” a place run by gruff but honest workers who were doing away with the economic and political injustices that plagued the United States. The appeal of this vision was so powerful that many who clung to it had trouble confronting the brutal realities of the Soviet system. True believers dismissed the reports of famines, purges and concentration camps as capitalist propaganda, and...

... On the right, hatred of Russia also runs deep, and little or no distinction is made in most quarters between things Russian and Soviet. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and the anti-communist par excellence, told an interviewer in 2006, that is very disappointing, indeed. Why such blindness and rigidity across the political and media class in the Western world, and in the United States in particular?

In recent days, some choices of two countries bordering the Russian Federation have provoked very negative reactions in Moscow which sees its control over the "ex-Soviet" Russian world slipping. On July 28 in Armenia the former president Robert Kocharian was arrested (right in the picture), for many years the guarantor of loyalty to Russia, together with his close collaborator, General Jurij Khachaturov. The accusation is that he used violence against the demonstrations in 2008, after the elections that brought the Moscow candidate to the presidency. On August 2 it was the parliament of Moldova that displeased its former Soviet masters,...

In the lead-up to the July 15 Helsinki Summit between Putin and Trump, three countries in the Eurasian landmass were expecting the meeting with particular fear and concern. The first is Ukraine, which struggles with pro-Russian forces in the east of the country. However, the summit was hailed by many Russian analysts as well as politicians as not really bringing about any changes. In fact, the strongest expression of the unchangeable US stance on Ukraine after the summit was the “Crimea Declaration,” released by the Department of State on July 25, where Russian moves against Ukraine were once again ostracized....

While Pyongyang is cut off from the international financial system, it is able to make up to $2.3 billion in hard currency a year by sending some 100,000 or more workers abroad, according to estimates. Up to 80 per cent of them go to China and Russia, where they are employed in what the UN has called “slave-like conditions” and give up to 90 per cent of their wages to Kim Jong-un's regime. Contractors have said North Koreans helped build the World Cup stadium in St Petersburg, where at least one died on site. Previously many of them worked in...

Svetlana Alexievich’s magnum opus Second-Hand Time (first published in Russian in 2013), is an attempt to understand where Putin came from and why he has such a hold on the Russian people. In her Nobel lecture of December 2015, Alexievich described Russia as “a space of total amnesia”. The way she puts it, things now are getting even worse. “Lawmakers say we should put Gorbachev on trial, a Solzhenitsyn monument has been vandalised, and they’re putting up more and more statues to Stalin,” she says. “But it’s not Putin telling people to do that — the initiative is coming from...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supporters of a bill that would make international sports doping a crime argued Wednesday that the legislation would deter scandals like Russian state-sponsored drug use at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Yulia Stepanova, a Russian former track athlete who became a whistleblower about the drug program, said at a congressional hearing that ending doping in her country would have to “start from the top” — with Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The bill was named for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian lab director who exposed the cheating in Sochi. Rodchenkov has said the doping stemmed from Putin’s command...

If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a people person. On Monday he said he’d “certainly meet” with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani if the Iranian leader was interested. With that meeting, we will have run out of “Axis of Evil” heads of state with whom President Trump can press the flesh. The president declared that he’d meet with the Iranian “anytime they want to.” “I’ll meet with anybody,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with meeting.” For his willingness to enter into a confab with just about anybody, President Trump has taken fire from critics from...

“You are criminalizing diplomacy” .....Watch to the end. I guarantee you he won’t be invited back again. The man has been doing this for nearly 50 years and the two yahoos just want to push current political narratives with no historical context

President Trump on Monday insisted that the United States will not drop sanctions against Moscow. “Sanctions on Russia will remain as is,” Trump said, even as Putin demands that they be dropped. Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte first broached the subject and said lifting the sanctions would be “unthinkable.” Trump also scolded Germany — just as he did at the NATO summit — for agreeing to use a Russian natural gas pipeline while, in his estimation, not paying enough for defense.

Russia cannot compel Iranian forces to quit Syria, Moscow's ambassador to Tel Aviv said on Monday, rebuffing Israel's long-standing demand that it should work to ensure their total withdrawal from the country. "They are playing a very, very important role in our common and joint effort to eliminate terrorists in Syria," Ambassador Anatoly Viktorov told Israel's Channel 10 television in an interview. "That is why, for this period of time, we see as non-realistic any demands to expel any foreign troops from the entirety of the Syrian Arab Republic," he said. "We can talk with our Iranian partners very frankly...

Russia’s ambassador to Israel said in an interview Monday his country cannot force Iranian forces to withdraw from Syria, despite Israeli calls for Iran to withdraw from the country. Speaking with Channel 10 news, Anatoly Viktorov said the Iranians are “playing a very, very important role in our common and joint efforts to eliminate terrorists in Syria. Viktorov said Russia can talk to its “Iranian friends” about a full withdrawal from Syria, as Israel demands, but “we cannot force them.” “The Iranian presence in Syria… is fully legitimate according to the UN principles and the UN charter,” he added. He...