Free Republic

A Russian court has sentenced the opposition politician Ilya Yashin to eight and a half years in prison, in the most high-profile case to date of a Russian dissident being jailed for opposing the invasion of Ukraine. Yashin was tried on charges of spreading false information meant to discredit the Russian army, under a law introduced after Russia launched its invasion, due to a series of posts in May about the murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in the town of Bucha. “Expressing hatred of the political system of the Russian Federation and realising that he is...

A report commissioned by the United Nations this month found Russian forces in Ukraine committed an array of war crimes, including summary executions, torture, rape and other acts of sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians. The report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine details violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in four regions occupied by Russian armed forces. The commission focused its investigations largely in the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy. In preparing the report, the commission conducted 191 interviews and traveled to 27 cities over five separate visits. In some cases, the commission...

Even by the standards of the important military officers who came and went in this tiny village, the man walking behind the Kamaz truck stood out. Soldiers providing security peered from behind fences, their guns bristling in every direction. Two Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters circled overhead, providing additional cover for Col. Gen. Alexander Chaiko as he escorted an aid convoy in March from the schoolhouse on Tsentralna Street that Russian officers commandeered as a headquarters. Fifteen minutes away, in the village of Ozera, the lives of three men were about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. While Chaiko...

The Estonian weekly Eesti Ekspress interviewed the heads and several employees of Estonia’s, Latvia’s, and Lithuania’s state security agencies. This is what they had to say regarding Russia. ... Toots wasn’t surprised by the atrocities committed in Bucha. Nor were any other of the counterintelligence agents I interviewed in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. They’re aware of how Russians conducted themselves in the Baltics during the Second World War. Of how they conducted themselves before that. Of how they’ve always behaved. The West lacks such awareness. „[The West is] fortunate,“ Toots remarks. „We’re a buffer between them and Russia. They’ve forgotten...