Free Republic

Russian forces have surrounded the embattled Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and control 70% of it, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, but Kyiv's top general said Ukraine was pushing back hard and that fighting was raging in the city centre. Moscow has been trying to take full control of Pokrovsk, which Russians call by its Soviet-era name of Krasnoarmeysk, since mid-2024 as part of its push to take the whole of the wider Donbas industrial region. Instead of mounting a full frontal assault on the city, which used to be home to over 60,000 people and be an important logistics...

The Ukrainian public would not accept Kyiv simply handing over the country’s Donbas region to Russia in a peace deal, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday — advising US envoys against continually pushing a version of peace the war’s victims would see as an “unsuccessful story.” “Emotionally, people will never forgive this. Never. They will not forgive … me, they will not forgive [the US],” Zelensky told Axios, speaking as US, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Geneva. “This is part of our country, all these citizens, the flag, the land.” The president said it was “not fair” that President Trump...