Free Republic

Moscow took sharp action on Friday to curb inflation, fearing the effects of ever higher spending on the war in Ukraine and of a weakening Russian ruble. Russia’s central bank took the unexpected step of raising its benchmark interest rate by a full percentage point, to 8.5 percent from 7.5 percent. It was the first large hike in more than a year, and the bank warned that further increases were likely. “It is a surprise and on its face reflects more concern at the central bank about inflation and how the economy is doing than we had appreciated,” said Robert...

Over the last five days of May, Ruslan, an English teacher in a Russian town near the Ukrainian border, heard the distinct sound of a multiple rocket launcher strike for the first time. Shelling would begin around 3 a.m., sometimes shaking his house, and continue through the morning. He had heard the thud of explosions in distant villages in the past, he said, and in October shelling damaged a nearby shopping mall. But nothing like this. “Everything changed,” he said. Fifteen months after Russian missiles first roared toward Kyiv, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are starting to...

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in Bakhmut to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners, who are perishing by the thousands in the longest battle of the war, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday. The claim suggested that Ukraine sees an opportunity, despite the heavy casualties it has suffered in the eastern city, to exhaust Wagner’s nearly suicidal prisoner assaults, which Ukraine’s commanders regard as one of Russia’s most effective tactics. “This is their last stand,” Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern group of forces, told...

The horrific blackout that has engulfed all of Venezuela is not going away any time soon. Today is day four, and there will be more. New York Times has a good reporter on the case, Anatoly Kurmanaev, and he got pretty close to the bottom of it. He writes: I went to the heart of Venezuela's transmission system in Guarico to try to find out what's going on with the grid. Here's why partial blackouts are unfortunately likely to persist for a while. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Venezuela ground to a halt Friday as a national power blackout entered its second day, stalling public transportation, decimating already scarce food supplies, crippling the vital oil industry and threatening the lives of thousands of chronic patients.