Free Republic

Crimean officials have proposed solving water shortages in Sevastopol by supplying the city with drinking water from a lake that lies near a municipal landfill and a reservoir that has been closed since the Soviet era because of contamination concerns, a news report said. The plan to serve the city of 340,000 inhabitants on the Black Sea coast would "reanimate" the Orlovsky reservoir, whose water was deemed unsuitable for drinking in the 1980s, and tap into a lake in the nearby Inkerman region, local news site NovoCrimea.ru reported Tuesday, citing the director of Sevgorodvodokanal water utility, Nikolai Pereguda. The lake...

As the referendum on Scottish independence approaches, the “Yes” campaign is receiving an unexpected boost – from Russian nationalists. Supporters of the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea have latched on to Alex Salmond’s bid to leave Britain as a parallel to the struggle of ethnic Russians in Ukraine to break with a supposedly bullying overlord in Kiev. With resentment running high against Britain as a crusader for tough sanctions against Moscow over its patronage of the separatist rebels in Ukraine, blogs in Russia have become flooded with calls for Scottish “freedom”. The campaign – often tongue-in-cheek but chiming with official rhetoric...

Who stands to benefit if Denton bans fracking? Those behind the petition drive say it will benefit the Denton residents because they won’t have to worry about wells being fracked less than 300 feet away from their homes, which is what happened to several neighborhoods in South Denton. Economist Ray Perryman said the result will be millions of dollars and jobs lost for Denton, costing the city up to $251.4 million over 10 years. Being the oil capital of the country and one of top producers of oil and gas worldwide, the stakes will be high when Denton voters cast...

Russia is developing an array of new nuclear and conventional weapons to counter recent moves by the U.S. and NATO, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday as the military successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a nuclear submarine. Putin accused the West of using the crisis in Ukraine to reinvigorate NATO, warning that Moscow will ponder a response to the alliance's decision to create a rapid-reaction "spearhead" force to protect Eastern Europe

God is inside Vladimir Putin. A divine light transfixed Putin’s essence after his secret baptism as a child. We are not worthy of the Russian president. These were a few of the tenets advanced by radical Russian Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov in a September 7 lecture that marked one of the more bizarre expressions of a many-faceted grassroots cult of personality surrounding Russia’s paramount ruler.

Poland said on Wednesday the volume of gas it has received so far this week from Russian gas monopoly Gazprom was down by at least 20 percent. Some European countries believe Moscow may use a disruption of gas to Europe as a trump card in its confrontation with the West over Ukraine. The row has already dragged ties between Moscow and the West down to their worst since the Cold War. Ukraine's gas transport monopoly Ukrtransgaz was quoted by a Russian news agency as saying Gazprom was limiting flows to Poland to disrupt supplies of gas in the opposite direction,...

More types of aircraft are still needed for Beijing to establish its first carrier air wing on China's first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, according to Wendell Minnick, in an article written on Sept. 7 in Washington-based Defense News. 24 J-15 Flying Shark fighters, six Z-18F anti-submarine warfare helicopters, four Z-18J airborne early warning helicopters and two Z-9C rescue helicopters will together form the first carrier air wing of the People's Liberation Army Navy according to an article in Chinese-language newspaper Shanghai Morning Post published Aug. 28, citing an interview with Cao Dongwei, a senior colonel and researcher at the PLA...

BRUSSELS — Eight weeks after a Malaysia Airlines plane disintegrated over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard and triggering a frenzy of East-West finger-pointing, investigators, in their first account of the calamity on Tuesday, released evidence consistent with an attack by a surface-to-air missile but shed no clear light on who was responsible. A preliminary report issued in The Hague by the Dutch Safety Board, which is leading an international effort to get to the bottom of the tragedy, gave some indirect support to assertions by the United States and Ukraine that pro-Russian rebels shot down the aircraft with...

...faces unprecedented challenges to its long-term expansion and modernization plans.... Last week Rosneft said it would cut staff to reduce costs: Kommersant business daily said Rosneft's Moscow headquarters would see cuts of up to 25 percent from the current 4,000. These would be the first significant job losses at a company that swelled via the acquisition of rivals such as YUKOS, pushed into bankruptcy some ten years ago by the government of President Vladimir Putin. Since then Rosneft's output has risen 10-fold to exceed 4 million barrels per day or four percent of global supply. But last week it reported...

"I say to the people of Estonia and the people of the Baltics, today we are bound by our treaty alliance. ... Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all. So if ... you ever ask again, 'who'll come to help,' you'll know the answer -- the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America." That was Barack Obama in Tallinn, Estonia, last week, reissuing a U.S. war guarantee to the tiniest of the Baltic republics -- which his Cold War predecessors would have regarded as certifiable madness. From 1945...

Russia, one of the world's largest wheat exporters, has supplied 4.7 million tons of all grains including pulses to its customers abroad in August. Its top customers are in North Africa and the Middle East. Russian wheat prices rose for a second straight week thanks to a record pace of August exports, high domestic demand and weak rouble that offset continuing harvesting, analysts said on Monday.

Assuming the ceasefire declared in Ukraine as of sundown Friday holds—and the early signs are favorable—we celebrate the end of a conflict that has claimed a startling 2,600 lives since it broke out in April. But not so fast. It’s also time to recognize the Obama administration’s strategy in Ukraine as among the worst of its numerous foreign-policy errors. The agreement just forged between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, is acknowledged all around as the design Putin suddenly proposed when he got off a plane in Mongolia late last week. In all likelihood, this was the...

(Reuters) - NATO staged a major military exercise in Latvia on Saturday in a practical demonstration of NATO leaders' commitment to defend its Baltic member states in the face of an assertive Russia.

Set on restoring the once formidable Soviet military presence in the highly contested and resource-rich Arctic, the Russian military has begun building new military bases in the region, a Defense Ministry spokesperson said Monday. "On Wrangel Island and Cape Schmidt, block-modules have been unloaded for the construction of military camps. The complex is being erected in the form of a star," Colonel Alexander Gordeyev, a spokesperson for the Eastern Military District, was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti. Russia has been talking about militarizing the Arctic for years as part of its greater strategy to explore and industrialize the pristine...

The ship was circled by one surveillance plane and two fighter jets, according to the defence minister's office. The frigate HMCS Toronto left Halifax in late July to replace HMCS Regina, which has been a part of the Standing NATO Maritime Forces since May. "Canada and its allies are involved in security measures taken by the acts of military aggression perpetrated by the Putin regime and because of the invasion of Ukraine," he said, calling on Russia to stop its "irresponsible actions." This ship has about 250 crew on board and is participating in Operation Reassurance

Sources say three Russian aircraft flew low over HMCS Toronto on Sunday. Two of the Russian planes were SU-24 fighter jets and the third was a slower AN-26 surveillance aircraft, a source said. “We expect this,” the military source said. “They’re going to play cat and mouse with us for as long as we’re there.” At least one of the Russian planes came within 300 metres of HMCS Toronto, a government source said.

Russia has reopened 25-year-old cases that may lead to criminal charges against young people who refused to serve in the Soviet army in 1990-1991, shows a request for legal assistance received by the Lithuanian Prosecutor General's Office.

Famed Russian musician and leader of the soviet rock band "The Time Machine" Andrei Makarevich has introduced a new song named ‘My country has gone mad.’ The anti-war song was presented during the open studio show ‘Echo of Moscow’ in Moscow’s Gogol Boulevard. The musician has already become the center of a Kremlin witch hunt for his anti-war position. Makarevich openly opposes the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russian aggression aimed at Ukraine. After performing a concert in Donbas in support of the liberation of Slovyansk from Kremlin-backed insurgents, Makarevich suffered severe criticism and persecution in his home country.

Two Russian strategic bombers conducted practice cruise missile attacks on the United States during a training mission last week that defense officials say appeared timed to the NATO summit in Wales. The Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers were tracked flying a route across the northern Atlantic near Iceland, Greenland, and Canada’s northeast. Analysis of the flight indicated the aircraft were conducting practice runs to a pre-determined “launch box”—an optimum point for firing nuclear-armed cruise missiles at U.S. targets, said defense officials familiar with intelligence reports. Disclosure of the nuclear bombing practice comes as a Russian general last week called for Moscow...

The video which follows this article was published on social media by members of the terrorist organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, includes threats to attack Russian President Vladimir Putin and liberate Chechnya and the Caucus Region with Russian fighter jets and missiles ISIS had seized from Tabaqa Airport in Raqqa, Syria as reported by IraqiNews.com on 27 August. Vladimir Putin, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is a principal supplier of weapons and equipment for Syrian government forces. A member of ISIS directs his words to Putin, “these Russian planes which you had sent to Bashar,...