Free Republic

Payment-seeking software made by Russian hackers was used in three quarters of all the ransomware schemes reported to a US financial crime agency in the second half of 2021, a Treasury Department analysis released on Tuesday (Nov 1) showed. In analysis issued in response to the increase in number and severity of ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure in the United States since late 2020, the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said it had received 1,489 ransomware-related filings worth nearly US$1.2 billion in 2021, a 188 per cent jump from the year before. Out of 793 ransomware incidents reported to...

In February, Lebanese journalist Mohammed Shoaib was arrested on suspicion of collusion with Israel’s Mossad spy agency. The writer who worked for Al-Jaras, confessed that the notorious spy agency secretly paid him to author “dozens” of anti-Hezbollah articles, receiving a paltry $30 to $70 per article. In particular, Shoaib was tasked with writing hit jobs on the “Iranian occupation” of Lebanon, and falsely linking Hezbollah with the August 2020 Beirut port blast, drug trafficking, and murder of political activists. It is also alleged that Mossad specifically requested his work incite hostility towards Palestinian refugees in the country who number almost...

Boris Johnson has declared Russia “must fail and be seen to fail” if it invades Ukraine, warning of a bloody and protracted conflict once Russian troops cross the border ..He said: “If dialogue fails and if Russia chooses to use violence against an innocent and peaceful population in Ukraine, and to disregard the norms of civilised behaviour between states, and to disregard the Charter of the United Nations, then we at this conference should be in no doubt that it is in our collective interest that Russia should ultimately fail and be seen to fail.” He added: “I believe that...

Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov threatened the annihilation of the United Kingdom on Wednesday with the Sarmat, Russia’s newest ballistic missile. “One Sarmat means minus one Great Britain,” Moscow mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov said on state TV. “Because they’ve gotten totally boorish.” Solovyov — occasionally called “Putin’s voice” for his close ties to the strongman — is the same TV presenter at the center of a debunked assassination attempt, in which the Kremlin said neo-nazis armed with video games planned to kill the Kremlin lackey. Solovyov made the statement from behind a laptop emblazoned with the letter “Z,” which has...

Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, is convening a meeting of her security council on Tuesday following a series of incidents in the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria and a warning from Moscow that the Russian-backed region could be drawn into the war in Ukraine. Transnistria, which borders western Ukraine, is controlled by pro-Russia separatists and permanently hosts 1,500 Russian troops as well as a large arms depot. Last week, a senior Russian commander said the goal of Russia’s new offensive was to seize control of southern Ukraine and to gain access to Transnistria, creating worries that the small east European country...

Oksana Ostapenko was 12 years old and facing death from hunger when a stranger saved her life by taking the girl into his family and sharing the last of their food. Today, aged 97, the Ukrainian's voice trembles when she recalls the terrible famine that hit her country in the 1930s due to policies enforced by Joseph Stalin's police. "They came and took away all our grain..." The death toll of the famine - known as the "Holodomor" in Ukrainian - remains debated among historians. But Kiev authorities estimate the number of those who died at around four million, or...

When I was a graduate student at Columbia University's Russian Institute, there was a great debate: Was the communist Soviet Union an organic Russian development or was it largely a cancer imposed on it? Those who held the organic view argued that the change from czar to commissar was only one of degree. Both were tyrannies, the latter more tyrannical than the former. I agreed with the second view, that communism was something radically new, not a logical, let alone inevitable, Russian path. The czars were autocrats, not genocidal totalitarians. I have to admit that in recent years, I...

Disgraced former President Victor Yanukovych called for urgent action to resolve the ongoing separatist violence in eastern Ukraine in a statement from Rostov-on-Don on April 21. Yanukovych requested the “immediate removal of all Ukrainian Armed Forces from the east of Ukraine, sent there as a detachment of the so-called ‘national guard,’ dressed in military uniforms and armed with automatic weapons and grenades.” Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine on February 22 after being accused of ordering riot police to fire on activists demanding his removal from power, called for “the immediate commencement of peaceful dialogue with the leaders of the eastern regions.”