Free Republic

Russia is currently in the process of expanding and modernizing its navy. This might have something to do with Moscow’s apparent appetite for military conquest — although Russia also has a few nuclear submarines that are dangerously past their prime, considering the fissile materials that are still stored onboard. In 2009, one rusted behemoth was transported to a factory in the far eastern port city of Vladivostok, close to the Korean peninsula, for decommissioning. With the vessel fully out of water, the pictures offer an amazing perspective on how massive and complex even an outdated class of nuclear submarine really...

Vulgar chants about Vladimir Putin before he arrived for a regional summit in Belarus did not augur well for the Russian president's hopes of bringing the leaders of former Soviet republics closer together. Matters got even worse when bickering broke out at the start of the meeting, revealing fault lines over the Ukraine crisis and deepening doubts about the future of the loose grouping known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Jibes between Putin and the leader of Moldova, and barbs aimed at the absent Ukrainian leader, raised new questions about his ability to woo countries to the Eurasian Economic...

Designers competing to create an aircraft that could directly support troops on the battlefield were hampered by the weight of the ‘flying tank’, low air speed and flimsy protection. The Il-2 was the answer to these challenges. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that the airplane had a crucial role to play in effective military campaigns in the new era. With this in mind, in the 1920s and 1930s Europe’s leading nations expended significant efforts and resources on developing new aircraft that could be used to provide support for infantry and tanks. The Soviet Union...

Strange thing about Flood Wall Street, the financial-district protest that followed the People’s Climate March: Nobody had much to say about the climate — what they came to talk about was capitalism. “Stop Capitalism,” “End Capitalism,” “Capitalism Kills,” the placards read. Kshama Sawant, the socialist Seattle city-council member who funds her crusade against capitalism by being married to a man with Microsoft money, called for a “radical, militant” movement linking environmental concerns to such traditional socialist enterprises as heavy government intervention into targeted industries, including energy and transportation. Question: What happened to the environment the last time people with radically...

WARSAW (Reuters) - More than 200 Polish miners blocked trains carrying Russian coal at a border passage in northern Poland to protest against the cheaper Russian coal being brought in at a time when local mines are struggling, mining union leaders said on Wednesday. Poland, which uses coal to generate about 90 percent of its electricity, produced 76.5 million tonnes in 2013. It exported 10.6 million tonnes but at the same time imported 10.8 million, mainly from Russia and the Czech Republic. Imported coal proves cheaper than that from Poland's largest miners such as Kompania Weglowa or JSW. Faced with...

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.

The MiG-29 Fulcrum outside the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has a hornet’s nest growing in its nose. Its tires, lifted off the ground by stands, are split and shredded. Bird droppings drool off its radome. The aircraft gives the impression of a war prize displayed like a head on a stake. In a way, it is a war prize, taken in the winning of the cold war. It’s one of 17 MiG-29s the U.S. government purchased from the former Soviet state of Moldova in 1997, a deal that kept the jets from...

Russia has banned fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, milk and dairy imports from the US, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway. Dmitry Medvedev said the ban was effective immediately and would last for one year. The agriculture minister, Nikolai Fyodorov, said on Thursday that greater quantities of Brazilian meat and New Zealand cheese would be imported to offset the newly prohibited items. He added Moscow was in talks with Belarus and Kazakhstan to prevent the banned western foodstuffs being exported to Russia from the two countries. The Kremlin's move comes in response to the grounding of the budget airline subsidiary...

Russia could ask its richest citizens to help foot the bill for the annexation of Crimea by paying a "solidarity tax" proposed by a group of lawmakers. Deputies from the State Duma lower house of parliament, which is dominated by backers of President Vladimir Putin, have drawn up a draft law that would increase income tax for people earning more than more than 1 million roubles ($28,700) a month. It would affect less than 2 percent of the working population but the amounts could be huge for some individuals because the daft proposes they pay up to 30 percent of...

Perhaps chess champions who escaped from the old Soviet Union can give us better history lessons than academic historians. “Sometimes I joke that if guys like Barack Obama and David Cameron had been in power in the 1980s, I would still be playing chess for the Soviet Union,” Garry Kasparov said at a Cato Institute dinner in May. garry kasparov By way of contrast, Kasparov observed that “Ronald Reagan had two things more recent free world leaders lack: principles and the credibility only principles can provide.” At the Cato Institute dinner, he took note of some recent trends in this...

When we talk about combat aircraft that are so ugly they are brutishly beautiful, aircraft like the A-10, B-52 and the Mi-24 come to mind. Yet an obscure Russian close air support aircraft that lost a competition to the now notorious Sukhoi Su-25 may take the trophy for the must gorgeously ugly combat jet of all time. By the late 1960s Russia was looking for a new jet aircraft that would be dedicated to close air support (CAS). After studying close air support scenarios and data collected since WWII it was clear that the fast, swept-wing jets and heavy bombers...

Former Soviet minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, who is credited with helping end the Cold War, died Monday after a long illness, his spokeswoman tells the media. To remind you of the former leader's career, NPR's Corey Flintoff has this report for our Newscast unit: "White-haired and dapper, Eduard Shevardnadze was the face of Soviet foreign policy during the era when President Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to liberalize the Communist bloc. "He was admired by counterparts in the West — but many Russians came to blame him, along with Gorbachev, for the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. "Shevardnadze...

Ah, the fruits of socialism: if only we'd allow Dear Leader  unbridled power, I just know he could make everything better... More at Reaganite Republican...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said Hillary Clinton’s recent comments comparing his actions to those of Adolf Hitler are a sign of weakness, saying she “has never been too graceful” in her public statements. Putin was asked if he thought "it would be worse if you were meeting with Hillary Clinton" given the former secretary of state's rhetoric. "I think even in this case we could reach an agreement," Putin said. "When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.

Presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia sign historic agreement establishing the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, a EU-like economic zone that resembles more the old USSR. Eurasian Economic Union to Restore USSR The New American 04 June 2014 On May 29, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian and Kazakh counterparts, Alexander Lukashenko and Nursultan Nazarbayev, met at the Kazakh capital, Astana, where they signed a treaty creating the Eurasian Economic Union, comprising Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Federation. “The just-signed treaty is of epoch-making, historic importance,” Vladimir Putin said. According to Putin, the new treaty will...

For the 21st consecutive quarter the US economy has failed to live up to the Obama Administration’s promised improvement. The revised GDP for the January-March period of 2014 showed a 1% decline. The vaunted recovery from the “Great Recession” remains elusive. Jason Furman, Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, attributed the decline in GDP to “bad weather,” which he blamed on “GOP resistance to the President’s efforts to curb global climate change.” “In one sense, bad weather can just be bad luck,” Furman suggested. “The Soviet economy was hammered year-after-year by an incredible streak of bad weather from...

(Reuters) - Lech Walesa, head of the Solidarity movement that ended Communism in Poland, knelt in prayer on Friday at a Catholic funeral mass for General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Communist leader who for decades was his sworn enemy.

Moscow is banning Washington from using Russian-made rocket engines, which the US has used to deliver its military satellites into orbit, said Russia’s Deputy PM, Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries. According to Rogozin, Russia is also halting the operation of all American GPS stations on its territory from June 1. DETAILS TO FOLLOW

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia staged a huge May Day parade on Moscow's Red Square for the first time since the Soviet era on Thursday, with workers holding banners proclaiming support for President Vladimir Putin after the seizure of territory from neighboring Ukraine. Thousands of trade unionists marched with Russian flags and flags of Putin's ruling United Russia party onto the giant square beneath the Kremlin walls, past the red granite mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin. Many banners displayed traditional slogans for the annual workers' holiday, like: "Peace, Labour, May". But others were more directly political, alluding to the...

A 007-style of mission to capture a Mig-21 in the 1960s. Built in more than 11,000 examples and acquired by countless countries around the globe, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 was introduced in several Arab arsenals in the early 1960s, becoming the most modern among the Soviet jets flown in the Middle East in that period. After it entered the active service, Israelis feared that the Fishbed was superior to the Mirage III fighter jets hence they needed as much details about it as possible to assess its capabilities since any information about this new fighter could give to the Israeli Air...