Free Republic

President George W. Bush famously underestimated Vladimir Putin. Asked about his impressions of the Russian president, the then-US president claimed that he had “looked into Putin’s eyes” and “saw his soul.” His secretary of state, Colin Powell, said that he, too, had looked into Putin’s eyes “and I saw the KGB.” Bush found out what was behind Putin’s eyes a little too late. Toward the end of Bush’s second term, in 2008, Putin’s Russia invaded the neighboring country of Georgia... Ever since Putin repeated his Georgian maneuver on a much grander scale in Ukraine in 2022, there are still people...

Ukraine’s chief rabbi warned of a new “axis of evil” developing between Russia and Iran... Moshe Reuven Azman — who lost a son in the Ukraine war and whose daughter serves in the Israel Defense Forces — came to Washington on his own dime this week to plead with lawmakers and government officials to continue supporting Ukraine and Israel. “Israel and Ukraine, they have the same enemies — an ‘axis of evil,’ I call it, that looks like World War II,” Azman told The Post on Thursday. “I am an eyewitness myself: I lost my son one year ago when...

Russia killed at least 32 people, including two children, in Ukraine on after launching ballistic missiles on civilians attending Palm Sunday services — in what authorities say was the deadliest attack on civilians so far this year. The missile strikes targeted the northeastern city of Sumy around 10 a.m. local time while Ukrainians were marking Palm Sunday and attending church. They also took place less than 48 hours after President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witfkoff met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. An estimated 84 people, including 10 children, were injured in the deadly strike. That makes it one of the...

An American businessman is urging President Trump to help save his $200 million canned-food empire after Russian authorities took over his company and seized its assets. Los Angeles-based Leonid Smirnov, who fled Soviet communism in the 1970s, says he’s in a race against time to save Glavprodukt — the Campbell’s of Russia — which he founded in 1999 and built into a household name in his homeland. “What’s happening with my company is a raid under a government seizure and confiscation attempt,” If it can happen to him, he said in a warning to Trump, it can happen to any...

Vladimir Putin has said the United States is “serious” about taking Greenland and warned Russia is ready and willing to militarily “protect its interests in the arctic.” It comes as Ukraine’s allies, including the United Kingdom, met in France to discuss peacekeeping plans in the event of a ceasefire. Britain and France confirmed on Thursday they are drawing up plans to send a "reassurance force" to Ukraine and will soon send military chiefs to the country to determine the scheme’s viability. Speaking after the announcement, Russia’s Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning to NATO countries as he declared Russia is...

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has slammed Europe’s “cowardice” to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin as his nation looks to arm itself with nuclear weapons to avoid the same fate as Ukraine. Tusk said the current situation in Europe, which is scrambling to react to President Trump’s decision to halt military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, would not have happened if the union took harsher actions against Russia. “Our deficit has been the lack of the will to act, having no confidence, and sometimes even cowardice,” Tusk told his parliament on Friday, adding that Moscow would have been...

Surprise occurs in many forms. Many think of it in terms of a surprise attack, but it occurs in other dimensions. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a good example: the attack was foreseen, but the immediate outcomes were astonishing. To use an old Soviet phrase, analysts misunderstood in fundamental ways the “correlation of forces.” Their judgments about Russian and Ukrainian military capacity were not merely off—they were wildly at variance with reality. And even more perplexing, leading and widely acknowledged experts misjudged with a degree of certainty that in retrospect is no less remarkable than the...

A new TikTok trend has people posting their attempts to exploit a “glitch” in Chase bank ATMs that offers “infinite free money” — but quickly learning that a bank and its money are not so easily parted. Experts say the “glitch” videos look an awful lot like check fraud — one of the oldest scams in the book. Videos urging customers at the bank to take advantage of the “glitch” quickly took off online, prompting people to deposit fake checks for large sums of money. The glitch would credit some of the sham deposits to the customers’ accounts before the...

I’m starting this report with a discussion of the word “strategic” in relation to its use in the Russo-Ukraine War. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the word, and almost everything the Russians try to take is instantly labelled strategic (which the opposite seems to be the case for Ukraine. Moreover, we have some interesting reports coming in this morning of what might actually qualify as a strategic campaign (though it will get less coverage that a village in the Donbas). A Russian power generation facility on fire, north of Moscow. There remains a fundamental failure to understand...

An analysis of open source evidence, as well as missile experts, have pointed to a Russian launched Kh-101 cruise missile being the weapon that struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv, debunking claims from pro-Russian accounts and actors that denied responsibility and sought to shift the blame for the incident on to Ukraine. The July 8 attack on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital killed at least three children and injured 16 others, according to the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU). However, the full toll of dead and injured remains unknown with individuals reported to still be trapped under rubble. In the aftermath...

Russia did not want peace, only the capitulation of Ukraine. Jakub Kumoch, former Secretary of State of President Andrzej Duda, who accompanied the Ukrainian delegation to negotiations with Russia in Belarus and Turkey in the spring of 2022, told the newspaper The Polish Times. The Introduction - That negotiations were a dead end. Moscow did not want a lasting peace - this is how Jakub Kumoch says about the backstage negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 2022. Today he is the ambassador of the Republic of Poland to China, in 2022 he is the Secretary of State...

The Summary of the Report Background 2014-2021 Since the first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2014, faith-based communities of various denominations have fully experienced the brutality and ruthlessness of Russia’s repressive policy in the occupied territories of Crimea and the Donbas region. Russian troops and Russian- backed separatists have targeted religious leaders and individual believers of most faiths, except the Orthodox parishes affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate. Representatives of religious minorities were arbitrarily arrested, threatened, beaten, illegally imprisoned, tortured, and some were deliberately killed. The repressive policy in the self-proclaimed “people’s republics,” in those parts...

Islamic State released on Saturday a photo of what it said were the four attackers behind a shooting rampage that killed at least 143 people in a concert hall near Moscow on Friday, the terrorist group's Amaq news agency said on Telegram. The publication noted that the attackers were armed with grenades, explosive devices, firearms, and knives. It was also reported that four ISIS terrorists carried out the attack - three of them were firing shots with firearms, while the fourth used explosives at the scene, Ynet reported. "The attack comes within the context of a raging war between the...

Four unnamed sources from the Russian President’s administration and the Ministry of Defence told the news website Verstka that a new wave of mobilized troops could soon be sent to Ukraine. These soldiers will likely comprise reservists and existing conscripts who will be “cajoled” into signing new contracts once their current tour of duty ends. “Something is coming. Reservists are being recruited now, the same as before the last mobilization. Whether the mobilization will happen or not, I don’t know, but last time the procedure was the same,” an officer from one of the military units in the Zabaikal region,...

Ukraine authorities in the eastern Donetsk region of the country launched a war crimes-murder investigation after six seriously wounded Ukrainian troops allegedly were executed by Russian forces as they were waiting to be medevacked from Avdiivka. The alleged murders by a Russian soldier of two Ukrainian POWs in the nearby village of Vesele, 12 miles northeast of the frontline city of Bakhmut, is the subject of a second separate investigation, the Donetsk regional prosecutor's office said Sunday in a social media post. Advertisement The probe of the executions of prisoners in Avdiivka, which fell to Russian forces at the weekend,...

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell is not known for his resolve. It’s the main reason why the new and emerging consensus among Wall Street Fed watchers is that he will cut interest rates at least twice this year despite signs of persistent inflation, the Post has learned. If the CEOs and top executives who follow the Fed can be believed — and these folks have sources inside the central bank’s building in DC — Powell is already brushing off last week’s high inflation reads as a likely anomaly. His first rate cut since he started to raise them in March...

A con artist who is accused of defrauding the US Army out of $100 million has been given the green light to retire with full benefits. Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, who is currently under criminal investigation, brazenly claims she “earned” her civil servant retirement package despite allegedly using the funds to purchase over 30 homes, luxury cars, and jewelry through the seven-year-long scheme. The military admitted that there is nothing that can be done to withhold Mello’s benefits from her as it’s protected under a federal law that was held up in government bureaucracy. “The command has no authority to...

Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was hit with new charges by Russia Friday, according to reports. Navalny, 47, is already serving more than 30 years in prison after he was found guilty of charges that he and his supporters say were politically motivated. This time, he said in social media posts shared by his spokesperson that he has been charged under article 214 of Russia’s penal code, which covers crimes of vandalism. Navalny, a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that the Kremlin wants to “initiate a new criminal case against me every three months.” “I don’t...

A short-term bill that will stave off a partial government shutdown for at least another two months cleared the House of Representatives Tuesday evening, bringing lawmakers one giant step closer to keeping federal operations going after 11:59 p.m. Friday. The 336-95 vote represented a win for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who unveiled his plan for a so-called “laddered” continuing resolution (CR) Saturday. A contingent of conservative Republicans quickly came out in opposition to the bill, which they complained lacked spending cuts. However, 209 Democrats offered their support and helped send the measure on to the Senate, where it is...

For Moscow to finally let go of its imperial ambitions, it must lose the war it has been waging in Ukraine. As the history of the last few hundred years shows, this is the only way Russia will change. The idealogue at the head of Putinist Russia, Vladislav Surkov, has made his vision of an ideal Russia very clear. In his view, Russia is a country that “having stopped falling, has begun to rebuild itself and returned to the natural and only possible state of a great, growing and land-collecting community of nations." Surkov says that Russia makes "no promise"...