Free Republic

Moscow’s advantage on the Ukraine battlefield is waning, experts say. But President Donald Trump seems disinclined to ramp up pressure on the Kremlin to engage in ceasefire talks.Russia’s battlefield strength in Ukraine has started to wane and it could run into serious shortages of manpower and weaponry by next year, even as President Donald Trump retreats from pressure on Moscow to end the war, according to senior U.S. and European officials and military experts. In recent days, Trump appears to have abandoned the threat of harsh financial sanctions he repeated as recently as two weeks ago if Moscow doesn’t agree...

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, the country’s military intelligence service. Some of the...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin warned earlier this month that Western approval for Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia would mean Moscow was at war with NATO, Russian propagandists rushed to rattle the nuclear saber. Alexander Mikhailov, director of the Bureau of Military Political Analysis, called for bombing plywood mock-ups of London and Washington — complete with reproductions of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the White House — to simulate nuclear strikes, so that they would “burn so beautifully that it will horrify the world.” The speaker of the lower house, Vyacheslav Volodin, warned that strikes on Russia would lead...

When President Biden proposed an additional $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine in August, Moscow spin doctors working for the Kremlin were ready to try to undermine public support for the bill, internal Kremlin documents show. In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents...

... The situation has worsened considerably since the summer when, buoyed by a steady stream of oil and gas revenue, the Russian economy seemed to stabilize. Figures released by the Finance Ministry last week show a key economic indicator—tax revenue from the non-oil and gas sector—fell 20 percent year in October compared with a year earlier, while the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat reported that retail sales fell 10 percent year on year in September, and cargo turnover fell 7 percent.... “The spiral is escalating, and there is no way out of this now.” ... The Western ban on technology...

In the two months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the silence — and even acquiescence — of the Russian elite has started to fray. Even as opinion polls report overwhelming public support for the military campaign, amid pervasive state propaganda and new laws outlawing criticism of the war, cracks are starting to show. The dividing lines among factions of the Russian economic elite are becoming more marked, and some of the tycoons — especially those who made their fortunes before President Vladimir Putin came to power — have begun, tentatively, to speak. For many, the most immediate focus has been their...

Former British spy Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson claimed to have concerns about the safety and security of one of the sources for the dossier, but outed him anyway by talking to journalists. Steele told a State Department official in October 2016 that “source protection” was a focus in his investigation of President Donald Trump, according to notes from the meeting released earlier this month. That purported concern was also shared by Simpson, who hired Steele on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. He told Justice Department official Bruce Ohr on Jan. 20,...