Free Republic

As they struggle to maintain an electricity grid heavily damaged by Russian missiles, officials in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, say they have begun planning for a once unthinkable possibility: a complete blackout that would require the evacuation of the city’s approximately three million remaining residents. The situation is already so dire, with 40 percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed, that municipal workers are setting up 1,000 heating shelters that can double as bunkers while engineers try to fix bombed-out power stations without the needed equipment. To try to keep the grid from failing altogether, Ukraine’s national energy utility...

But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilizing Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically. Before the refugee crisis, the European Union was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than a million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilizing...

BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran on Sunday and gave all Iranian diplomats 48 hours to leave the kingdom, as escalating tensions over the execution of an outspoken Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia marked a new low in relations between the two Middle Eastern powers. The surprise move, announced in a televised news conference by Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, followed harsh criticism by Iranian leaders of the Saudi execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and the storming of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran by protestors in response. Mr. Jubeir said that the kingdom would not allow...

Ben Hubbard of the New York Times writes of the Islamic State, or ISIS, that “…the group is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated economics; and providing a rare sense of order in a region overwhelmed by conflict.” This summary of ISIS and their good deeds sounds eerily similar (and just as disgusting) to the accolades bestowed upon Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party before — and even after — the Second World War and the Holocaust. Hubbard uses the example of a nameless labourer from Raqqa who had “earned good money painting their offices,” who opined...

Though it’s been well documented that opposition forces in Syria are mostly run by Islamic terrorists—mainly Al Qaeda—Congress has secretly approved U.S. weapons flow to what officials describe as “moderate” Syrian rebel factions. The problem with this is that there are no “moderate” rebel forces in Syria, according to a number of reputable news reports, both domestic and international. In fact, the New York Times published a piece last spring that confirms Islamist rebels—including the most extreme groups in the notorious Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-aligned force—are running the show in Syria. “The Islamist character of the opposition reflects...