Free Republic

They have become a familiar sight in the skies above parts of Russia: long-range enemy drones, buzzing their way to another target. In the biggest Ukrainian onslaught inside Russian territory since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion two years ago, Ukraine has in recent weeks carried out a series of attacks on Russian oil refineries and ports. On Tuesday, it hit a refinery and drone factory in the industrial region of Tatarstan - more than 800 miles from the border. The Ukrainian spy agency behind these drone strikes has its eyes on another target: the 12-mile long Kerch bridge connecting occupied Crimea...

When Hemil Mangukiya left his small village in the Indian state of Gujarat last December, he told his family he was off to Russia to make a better living than was possible at home in India. Lured by a recruitment video he had seen on YouTube, the 23-year-old had thought he was going for a secure security job far from the war in Ukraine. But in strained phone calls home from Russia, he told his family he was instead sent to a month-long military training camp and then taken to the frontlines, where he was made to dig trenches, carry...

“Are we having a talkshow or a serious conversation?” Vladimir Putin asked Tucker Carlson at the start of their interview on Thursday. By the end of the two-hour conversation, the answer was clear: neither. Instead, viewers got a lesson in Russian history, going all the way back to Prince Rurik – a Scandinavian who came and dished out a good kicking in the region in 862 – and taking in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, the circa-1300 threat of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia going to war with Poland in the mid-1600s. -snip- “So that you don’t...

A columnist for The Observer apparently didn’t sense the comedic value in telling readers with a straight face that the clownish concept of Bidenomics is somehow finally starting to work. Columnist Will Hutton’s Dec. 17 headline was just ludicrous: “With Bidenomics beginning to pay off, Keir Starmer needs to keep the faith and lift the gloom.” The leftist writer tried to use Biden’s laundry list of bad economic policies as a template to push for the U.K. Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Keir Starmer and his Labour Party to “stick to its plan for public investment.” Hutton propagated how...

On Sunday, Margaret Sullivan wrote her final column for the Washington Post, and unsurprisingly it was chock full of her overriding obsession with Donald Trump. Even the title of her swan song hinted at her obsession with Trump: My final column: 2024 and the dangers ahead.

In his Wall Street Journal column (“Why Hamas Atrocities Lead the Left to Hate Israel More,” Oct. 20) Shany Mor wrote that "many would think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks."... No British institution has demonstrated this pathology more than The Guardian, which, since Hamas’ Oct. 7 ISIS-style massacre of more than 1,400 Jews — which included rape, and murdering scores children and even babies in cold blood, and which forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens of those border communities from their homes —...

After Joe Biden daid: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” the US president said. “But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” *, The Guardian (by Chris McGreal, Oct.27.23) tries to propagate terror regime Hamas "numbers" and quotes for that: * * * Omar Shakir - the anti-Israel activist since 2010 and CAIR Hamas linked Islamist lobby. * * * *Enough said.

We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe ... The bombardment of Gaza is now constant. My nine-year-old asked me if he would go to heaven or hell Mahmoud Shalabi We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe Here in Gaza, what is happening under Israeli military bombardment has never been seen before. Homes are being destroyed without residents being warned. Israeli missiles are hitting high-rise buildings, mosques, streets – and we are asking...

The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians. On 7October, the National SecurityCouncil spokesperson Adrienne Watson stated that the US “unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians”. Every one of us must stand up and denounce the killing of every civilian, Israeli or Palestinian or otherwise. But Watson’s use of the word “unprovoked” is doing a lot of work here.... What exactly counts as a provocation? Not, apparently, the large number of settlers, more than 800 by one media...

It’s happened. The eco-crazies in the liberal media are trying to mesh climate change and the pandemic into one big fear porn monstrosity. The Guardian released a nutty story Oct. 18 propagandizing how “[t]he next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data.” The liberal outlet tried to frighten readers into believing in the imaginary specter of climate COVID: “The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local...

Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead. “We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.” That place was Lysychansk, one of the most...

At least 11 people were killed and 15 more wounded at a military training ground in the Belgorod region in south-western Russia on Saturday when two volunteers opened fire on other troops, the Russian defence ministry has said. .. According to Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to the police, the shooting took place at 10am local time during shooting practice. Saturday’s mass shooting points to growing tensions among Russia’s troops, issues that have plagued its army since the start of the war. The incident also comes as tens of thousands of newly drafted Russian men are sent...

Western officials are engaged in “prudent planning” behind the scenes to prevent chaos and panic in their home countries in the event Russia was to detonate a nuclear bomb in or near Ukraine. Although a nuclear crisis is considered highly unlikely, the insider said officials internationally were re-examining plans to provide emergency support and reassurance to populations fearful of nuclear escalation. Hints of the thinking emerged in a briefing by an official on Friday, who was asked if there would be measures in place to prevent panic buying or people fleeing cities en masse in fear of escalation after a...

Key figures including Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin are using military defeats to undermine defence chief Sergei Shoigu. Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine. The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats...

The Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea, a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular, has been hit by a massive explosion on the span that carries railway traffic. Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke. The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place around 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge, although it was not immediately clear what caused it. Some images appeared to show a...

After Russia’s chaotic retreats in Kherson – less than a week after Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian province alongside three others – the region’s Moscow-appointed governor, Kirill Stremousov, sought to calm the mood. Far from a rout, the withdrawal was a tactical “regrouping” to “deliver a retaliatory blow”, Stremousov said on Wednesday. His comments – among the first public admissions of Russia’s retreats in Kherson – attempted to mask what even many vocal supporters of the war now say: the situation is the most dire the Russian army has found itself in since the start of the invasion seven...

Two women in Russia-annexed Crimea, including Miss Crimea, have been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army by singing a patriotic Ukrainian song in a video posted on social media, local authorities have said. Olga Valeyeva, who won the Miss Crimea 2022 beauty pageant, and an unnamed friend sang the popular Ukrainian Chervona Kalyna song on a balcony. A video of the women singing was posted on Instagram ...."A video was published on the internet in which two girls performed a song that is the fighting anthem of an extremist organisation,” Crimea’s interior ministry said on Telegram on Monday. It...

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has appeared to concede the severity of the Kremlin’s recent military reversals in Ukraine, insisting Russia would “stabilise” the situation in four Ukrainian regions it illegally claimed as its own territory last week. Russia has suffered significant losses in two of the four regions since Friday, when Putin signed treaties to incorporate them into Russia by force, with Russian officials saying their forces were “regrouping”. “We are working on the assumption that the situation in the new territories will stabilise,” Putin told Russian teachers during a televised video call. With Ukraine pushing its advance in...

The Guardian is upset that Giorgia Meloni, very likely set to become Italy’s first woman prime minister, is opposed to gender quotas and “sexualised” herself during the election. In an article harping on the fact that the national conservative leader “posted [a] sexualised clip of herself during [the] election campaign, favours curbs on abortion and is against ‘pink quotas’” by Rome correspondent Angela Giuffrida, the British newspaper appeared irate that she believed “roles should be achieved through merit, not gender”. The “sexualised” video — a joke social media post uploaded after electioneering was officially closed of a fully-clothed Meloni holding...

A neo-Nazi pro-Kremlin group active in Ukraine is inciting atrocities against prisoners of war and explicitly advocates the torture of captives including “removing body parts”. The self-styled “Task Force Rusich” is fighting in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin and is linked to the notorious Wagner Group mercenaries. A message on Rusich’s Telegram channel sent on 22 September advocates the “destruction of prisoners on the spot”. Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a London-based initiative supported by the United Nations, said: “Rusich, an openly neo-Nazi group highly likely operating on behalf of the Kremlin, has promoted the commission...