Free Republic

Marco Rubio said that both Russia and Ukraine will have to make “concessions” in order to reach the peace deal promised by Donald Trump as he offered a full-throated defense of the president-elect’s vision for America’s role around the world – and his own hawkish record on foreign policy. Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, told the Senate foreign relations committee that the war in Ukraine had become a “stalemate” and “has to end”; that the US should show China that it would pay “too high” a price for invading Taiwan; and that European countries have to stop treating...

Britain is expected to supply Storm Shadow missiles for use by Ukraine on targets inside Russia, now that the US president, Joe Biden, has agreed to do the same for the similar American long-range Atacms weapon. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said at the G20 summit that the UK recognised it needed to “double down” on its support for Ukraine, while diplomatic sources briefed they expected other European countries to follow the US lead. The prime minister said that, while he was “not going to get into operational details”, he recognised the need to do more to help Ukraine, whose...

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...

Summons delivered to eligible men at midnight. Schoolteachers pressed into handing out draft notices. Men given an hour to pack their things and appear at draft centres. Women sobbing as they sent their husbands and sons off to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The first full day of Russia’s first mobilisation since the second world war produced emotional showdowns at draft centres and even signs of protest, while it appears Russia could be considering far more than the 300,000 new conscripts claimed by the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. One woman in a small village in the Zakamensky region of...

Russian leader seems keen to curry favour with Chinese president as battlefield setbacks and sanctions bite Vladimir Putin has told Xi Jinping that he understands China’s “questions and concerns” about the war in Ukraine, in a rare nod to tensions between the two states caused by the Russian invasion. The remarks came as Xi and Putin met on Thursday for the first time since the war began, at a summit in Uzbekistan where the Russian president was expected to court the Chinese leader personally as an ally in his conflict with the west. invasion that drew the most attention. In...