Free Republic

Syrian rebel Yarmouk Brigades ditch US and Israel allies, defect to ISIS The Syrian rebel militia Al Yarmouk Shuhada Brigades, backed and trained for two years by US officers, mostly CIA experts, in Jordan, and supported by the Israeli army, has abruptly dumped these sponsors and joined up with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, debkafile’s exclusive military and counter-terrorism sources reveal. The sudden defection of this 2,000-strong anti-Assad force leaves IDF defense formations on the Golan, US and Jordanian deployments in the northern part of the kingdom, and pro-Western rebel conquests in southern Syria in danger of collapse....

Stockholm (AFP) - Sales by Russian arms manufacturers continue to expand thanks to Moscow's investments despite a downturn in global defence spending, a Stockholm-based think-tank said Monday. "The remarkable increases in Russian companies' arms sales in both 2012 and 2013 are in large part due to uninterrupted investments in military procurement by the Russian government during the 2000s," said Siemon Wezeman, senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Sales by Russian-based arms firms grew by 20 percent in 2013, according to SIPRI. However, figures for the 100 biggest arms-dealing nations excluding China declined for the third year...

Copies of a highly critical book land in the private, inaccessible mailboxes of all Members of European Parliament The last time Lithuania’s leader, Dalia Grybauskaite, talked to Vladimir Putin personally was in 2010, when he was still Prime Minister of the Russian government. But Ms Grybauskaite, the president of this small Baltic country of 3 million people, has been talking about him all the time since. And now, she is in trouble. It all started with an interview she gave to the Washington Post (Sept. 24) in which Ms Grybauskaite said that Russia is allowed by “Europe and the world...

Stand on the sea wall next to the port in Varna and you can see the bits and pieces of South Stream piled up in front of you. Hundreds of long black sections of piping - some on the dockside, and others still stacked on cargo ships. They were supposed to have been laid beneath the gloomy waters of the Black Sea, bypassing Ukraine and bringing Russian gas directly to south-eastern Europe. But - suddenly and unilaterally - Vladimir Putin has declared the project dead. Gas, he said, will be sent to Turkey instead. "It's really not clear what's going...

Recently, the House passed, by an overwhelming margin, a resolution to condemn the Russian Federation for actions considered hostile and aggressive within its sphere of influence, specifically with regard to the politically torn country of Ukraine. Ten Members voted “nay,” myself among them. I wish to explain why I took this unpopular position. Above all, while Vladimir Putin’s government may well have engaged in questionable behavior toward neighboring countries, Resolution 758 was nothing more than gratuitous, needlessly provocative and shortsighted. Moreover, reasonable observers the world over can see it as tantamount to a declaration that Russia is America’s enemy. The...

It is probably the best-known weapon in the world, brandished by everyone from Che Guevara to Osama bin Laden. But the Kalashnikov assault rifle has failed to produce a profit for its makers for years. Things were just starting to improve when the firm was hit by Western sanctions. With Russian military stores full of the famously durable Kalashnikovs, and dwindling orders from abroad, the company had turned its attention to civilian firearms markets. In January it finally secured a foothold in the biggest of them, sealing a lucrative deal to supply up to 200,000 rifles a year in the...

President Vladimir V. Putin said Monday that he would scrap Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline, a grandiose project that was once intended to establish the country’s dominance in southeastern Europe but instead fell victim to Russia’s increasingly toxic relationship with the West. It was a rare diplomatic defeat for Mr. Putin, who said Russia would redirect the pipeline to Turkey. He painted the failure to build the pipeline as a loss for Europe and blamed Brussels for its intransigence. The decision also seemed to be a rare victory for the European Union and the Obama administration, which have appeared largely...

KIEV, Ukraine—The burly man with the close-cropped silver hair and his two companions ask not to be identified too closely when they talk to me in some dowdy offices near an ancient monastery overlooking the Dnieper River. They want to be described as “patriotic businessmen,” they say, and one of them, whom we’ll call Alexander, is a very, very rich patriotic businessman. They have been funding Ukrainian self-defense militias formed in response to what they see as the ineffectiveness of the Ukraine Armed Forces in the face of pro-Moscow separatists and Russian troops in the country’s southeast. And they suggest...

Every central banker knows the importance of trust. In a world of fiat currencies--bank notes backed by nothing other than more bank notes--shoppers and firms must have confidence that cash will retain its value in order to hold it. That trust is being tested in Russia, where the rouble has fallen 23% against the dollar in the past three months. Such a plunge inevitably brings inflation in the form of more expensive imports, a worry given that consumer prices in Russia are already rising at over 8% a year. Yet in recent weeks there have been creeping signs of something...

PARIS – France suspended the planned delivery of a warship to Russia on Tuesday, after months of growing speculation about what would be the biggest arms sale ever by a NATO country to the Kremlin. ·

A protest movement in Hungary over corruption and an increasingly pro-Russian leadership broke out this week,raising questions about whether the former communist nation is on the verge of becoming the next Ukraine. Hungary is more stable than Ukraine, which has been besieged by sectarian conflict for months, and seems less likely to fall into violent conflict,but growing anti-government demonstrations could become another battleground between Europe and Russia. The wave of Hungarian protests is focused on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasingly pro-Russian governance. Many shouted “Europe,Europe!” at Monday’s “Public Outrage Day” protest and one protester told AFP demonstrators "don’t want...

A recent study published by Swiss Credit shows that the Scandinavian countries are the countries of Europe where most social inequality is determined. The increase in inequality is one of 15 worldwide major risks identified during the last forum of Davos. Henry Milner is researcher invited to the department of political sciences has the university of Montreal, where he is linked to the research pulpit of the canada in electoral studies. In 2004-2005, i ran the pulpit in Canadian studies to the Sorbonne. He is notably admitted for his expertise on the Scandinavian countries and runs a summer school on...

<p>I grew up hating America. I lived in the Soviet Union and was a child of the Cold War. That hate went away in 1989, though, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. By the time I left Russia in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, America was a country that Russians looked up to and wanted to emulate.</p>

In the East Ukraine the fights become more violent again. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is trying to brings down the West. Many Germans are still on his side – partly from a bad tradition. It is strange how strongly the Russian picture in the Germans is marked by the fantasy and projection and how little it deals with the reality. There the respect comes, maybe even the fear of the size of the Russian empire and the raw language of her politics. The power-deprived Germans are afraid to project power and forgot the words of the real politics. These...

Belgrade (AFP) - Some 10,000 supporters of the Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, released by a UN war crimes court for cancer therapy, joined him Saturday at a rally in protest at his country's shift towards Europe. The gathering was seen as a test of Seselj's influence at home, where he returned this week after almost 12 years in detention at the court in The Hague, yet to issue a verdict in his trial for crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. "Serbia has to decide should it go towards the East (Russia) or towards the West, where all its...