Free Republic

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy collected five previously imprisoned Azov battalion commanders in a recent trip to Turkey, prompting confusion from Russia, which accused Ankara of walking back an agreement to keep them until the war's end. In a Saturday video posted by Zelenskyy, commanding members of the battalion — a white nationalist paramilitary force within the Ukrainian National Guard — can be seen hugging the Ukrainian president before they board a plane. The commanders had been captured in the port city of Mariupol. "We are returning home from Turkey and bringing our heroes home," a post on Zelenskyy's Twitter read.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed an executive order prohibiting state employees from leaving the country for “non-governmental purposes” while mobilization and martial law are in effect. The ban comes just days after news broke that Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Symonenko had used a car owned by Kyiv businessman Grigory Kozlovsky to take a Spain vacation in December and January. Symonenko reportedly submitted his resignation on Monday. The new rule applies to Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers, leaders of the Office of the President, Verkhovna Rada deputies, judges, prosecutors, and heads of the Security Service of Ukraine, the Central Election...

On a stage festooned with Confederate flags, a singer was belting out “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama near an obelisk honoring the Americans who fled to this outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War. “We’re not racists,” said Cícero Carr, 54, an engineer whose great-great-grandfather hailed from Texas. Wearing a fedora featuring the rebel battle flag, he explained in Portuguese, “We’re just revering our ancestors who had the good sense to settle in Brazil.” At the annual celebration of Brazil’s self-described Confederados one scorching Sunday in April, Confederate flags adorned the hoop-skirted gowns of young belles and the trucker caps...

In another heated exchange between State Department spokesman Marie Harf and AP reporter Matt Lee, the issue of whether any governments are funding ISIS / ISIL is proving to be a hot button issue. In this particular exchange, Qatar is the focus but other countries – specifically Turkey – should start getting spotlighted soon. Harf contends that there is “no evidence” of governments funding ISIL but Lee calls her on that assertion based on a quote from President Obama. To say there is “no evidence” that any government is “supporting this group (ISIS)” is a major lie ... Let’s go...

Introduction: The Missing Link Why did the US support the separatist and terrorist so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK in Shqip), which sought to create an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo based on ethnicity? Why did the US sponsor a criminal and illegal separatist movement that sought to ethnically cleanse non-Albanians and create an independent state of Kosova? Why was the US supporting and sponsoring the re-establishment of a fascist-Nazi Greater Albania that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had initially created? ... The recruitment of the former Nazi-fascist members of the Balli Kombetar by the CIA and MI6 in 1948...

Insurgencies are not put down in a fortnight. But considering the successes in the recent counter-insurgency sweep in Iraq's Al Anbar Province, one fact becomes obvious to anyone with so much as a sliver of an understanding of ground combat operations: Eliminating the insurgency in Iraq is best left to those who best know how to do it.

The recent spike in U.S. casualties in Iraq, although tragic, needs to be placed in strategic context. As usual, the press has not done so, focusing on the loss of life without any apparent effort to understand what the fighting that led to these casualties means. But the answer is there for anyone who wishes to probe beneath the surface. In fact, the intense fighting indicates that Coalition forces have stepped up their campaign in Al Anbar province to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its "rat lines" — the infiltration routes...