Free Republic

After three and a half years, President Vladimir Putin is having to lean more and more on ordinary Russians to pay for his war in Ukraine. The Russian Finance Ministry on Wednesday said it intends to raise value added tax by two percentage points to 22 percent, part of a three-year plan that aims to plug a rapidly expanding hole in public finances. VAT accounted for more than 15 percent of total government revenue last year. After raising personal income taxes sharply at the start of the year, Putin had pledged there would be no more big changes to the...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration that it’s not realistic for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders “is just surrender” but “the problem is that I don’t know how it doesn’t end this way.” Maher stated, “So, here’s what Pete Hegseth, our new Secretary of Defense said…he said, returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective, which, to me, is just surrender. Then again, we can argue about whether that’s true or not. The United States does not believe, also, that NATO membership for Ukraine is...