You know, one of the best features of FreeRepublic is that multiple eyes get to dig into and examine issues; you showed that you had obviously been looking around at various articles on this news and found a lack of corroboration, something that most would take as the first signs of a questionable article, so rather I thank you for pointing that out.
When I then went an looked further I only found among a wide search only the Reuters article above. Curiously, very few are watching these hugely significant geopolitical shifts going on, fortunately you are. This very fact of the lack of news on this subject I would consider newsworthy in itself. So again, thanks.