Free Republic

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in Bakhmut to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners, who are perishing by the thousands in the longest battle of the war, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday. The claim suggested that Ukraine sees an opportunity, despite the heavy casualties it has suffered in the eastern city, to exhaust Wagner’s nearly suicidal prisoner assaults, which Ukraine’s commanders regard as one of Russia’s most effective tactics. “This is their last stand,” Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern group of forces, told...

After several weeks of deadlock, Russia’s military appears to have found a way to advance in the Donbas – pounding it with such intense, unsophisticated artillery that Ukraine’s exhausted defenders are having to yield.Volodymyr Zelenskiy rarely gives casualty figures but Ukraine’s president said last Sunday that “50 to 100 Ukrainian troops die on Donbas frontlines each day”, meaning perhaps 3,000 a month in the grisly war of attrition.Wounded will typically be three or perhaps four times as much, a serious loss for a Donbas defence force estimated at 30,000 before the war began, although the numbers increased following Ukraine’s mass...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Failed stars, baby stars and vast cosmic canyons of dust and gas were on display in a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula released on Wednesday. "Orion is a bustling caldron of activity," Jennifer Wiseman of NASA said in a statement released with the image at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The most eye-catching feature of the image may be the caverns of light where thousands of stars are forming. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes are apparent. For the first time, Hubble was able to spot young brown dwarf stars...

In an interview published in Tuesday's (20 May) Le Figaro, US ambassador to France, Howard H. Leach, says that political tensions since the war in Iraq, are affecting trade relations between the two sides. Mr Leach, who took up his functions in Paris in July 2001, says that during his time as Ambassador, the single issue that most surprised him was "the hostile action of the French government in the UN." "That was a great shock to me," he added. When asked whether France's strong opposition to the American-led war in Iraq led to the feared boycott of French products...