Free Republic

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is pressing Kyiv to agree to painful territorial concessions as the price for peace. In a draft peace agreement first reported by Axios in November, the administration proposed that the entire regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk be recognized as de facto Russian territory and that Russia retain control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia its forces now occupy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing back, refusing to do anything that would violate his country’s territorial integrity. Yet the realities of the battlefield are not on his side....

KYIV, Ukraine, and MOSCOW — When the Kremlin launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the assumption in Moscow, and much of the West, was that Russian forces would take the country in a matter of days. Instead, what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" has become the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and has lasted longer than the Soviet army's fight against Nazi Germany. Russia's war on Ukraine is a grinding war of attrition. Ukraine has managed to hold a much larger army to minimal gains while adjusting to a life under constant...

Vladimir Putin’s chief delegate at peace talks with Ukraine is a historian who once claimed that Russians have an extra chromosome due to their superiority. -snip- Mr Medinsky also earned widespread ridicule after arguing that Russians were particularly heroic and able to survive hardship because they “have one extra chromosome”. While it is likely that he was trying to speak figuratively, the assertion, made in 2012, prompted scorn even within Russia, with critics pointing out that having an extra chromosome is associated less with genetic superiority than with conditions such as Down’s syndrome.