Free Republic

For one day at least, Russia’s opposition came alive to mourn its lost leader. The funeral of Alexei Navalny on Friday almost did not happen at all. But thousands ultimately turned out — braving the snow, heavy security and weeks of Kremlin efforts to derail the event — so that they could pay their respects to the man who challenged President Vladimir Putin with a vision for a democratic Russia. Bearing flowers, candles and placards, the crowd chanted Navalny’s name as his body was first delivered to a church in southern Moscow for a brief funeral and then to a...

After Russia invaded Ukraine, guerrillas from Belarus began carrying out acts of sabotage on their country’s railways, including blowing up track equipment to paralyze the rails that Russian forces used to get troops and weapons into Ukraine. In the most recent sabotage to make international headlines, they attacked a Russian warplane parked just outside the Belarusian capital. “Belarusians will not allow the Russians to freely use our territory for the war with Ukraine, and we want to force them to leave,” Anton, a retired Belarusian serviceman who joined a group of saboteurs, told The Associated Press in a phone interview....

In the last leg of what has been a heated midterm election cycle, some conservative groups have ramped up misleading or inflammatory campaign ads targeting transgender rights, which have become an increasingly partisan and divisive issue. A radio ad from America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Stephen Miller, who served as a top adviser to former President Donald Trump, accused President Joe Biden and “progressive leaders” of pushing children to take hormones and undergo surgery “to remove their breasts and genitals.” “Not long ago, everyone knew that you’re either born a boy or a girl,” the narrator says...

More and more North Korean construction workers deployed to Russia are escaping from their jobs after hearing they are to be sent to Russian-controlled areas in Ukraine, sources in Russia told RFA. The cash-strapped North Korean government sends legions of workers to Russia to earn desperately needed foreign currency. Workers forward the lion’s share of their salaries to the government, but what they get to keep is greater than what they could earn doing similar work back home. But now that there is demand for construction in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, increasing numbers of North Korean construction workers...

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...

“Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? Isn’t it Russia that attacked Ukraine?” The questions hurled at the police by a clamorous group of indignant women outside a theater in Dagestan’s capital That was last month the confrontation between infuriated mothers in Dagestan, a mountainous republic within the multi-national Russian Federation, took place shortly after Putin announced a partial mobilization. Elsewhere in the north Caucasian city, standoffs between protesters and baton-wielding police were fiercer with jostling and heavy-handed arrests, according to geo-located posted videos. Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics,...

Russian citizens who criticize the Kremlin could find themselves on the receiving end of a nasty visit from Chechen forces, according to an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin’s attempted "partial mobilization" of fighting-aged Russians into the war in Ukraine has prompted a wave of social displeasure, including a mass exodus of apparent draft dodgers and protests in the outlying regions where people are bearing the brunt of the war. Russian lawmaker Adam Delimkhanov, an ethnic Chechen politician known for threatening to decapitate the relatives of a human rights activist, warned university students against any display of disrespect. “I...

Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the State Duma of the Russian Federation (the Russian parliament), said that the so-called National Republican Army (NRA) has claimed responsibility for the murder of Darya Dugina, the daughter of "Putin’s ideologue" Aleksandr Dugin. Source: Ponomarev on air on Utro Fevralya (February Morning), his opposition TV channel, and in a commentary for Ukrainska Pravda Details: Ponomarev said that Darya Dugina had called for the murder of Ukrainians and was one of the voices inciting violence and calling for murders in the occupied territories [of Ukraine]. Among other things, she had offered a justification for...

When it finally dawned on Donald Trump in the twilight of his presidency that he wouldn’t be living in the White House for another four years, he had a problem: he had barely packed and had to move out quickly. West Wing aides and government movers frantically tossed documents and other items into banker boxes that were shipped to a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida along with other, previously packed records set aside by Trump, sometimes erratically so, according to two sources with knowledge of Trump’s move and records issues.

More than four months into Russia’s invasion, the wail of air raid sirens warning of an incoming strike has become, to some Ukrainians, a kind of background noise: irritating, alarming, but also possible to ignore. A series of deadly missile attacks by Russian forces in recent days that have hit civilian targets, however, has changed the calculus, sending Ukraine’s leaders scrambling to reinforce the message that adherence to the advisory to seek shelter saves lives. “I’m begging you, once again: Please don’t ignore the air alert signals,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a national address this weekend. “Appropriate...

A document, titled “1776 Returns,” which federal prosecutors said was used by the leader of the Proud Boys, lays out a plan to occupy Capitol buildings on Jan. 6, 2021, using covert operators to let "patriots" inside government offices in an apparent effort to force a new election. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, and four other members were indicted on seditious conspiracy charges this month. Tarrio has twice been ordered detained until trial. The nine-page document, filed in federal court Wednesday, lays out a plan to fill buildings “with patriots and communicate our demands." Its stated...

A detailed list of the destroyed and captured vehicles and equipment of both sides can be seen below. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available

Eldar Gadzhiev’s heart sank when he heard the sputtering from the engine of his Skoda one day in April. Gadzhiev, who owns a fleet of four cars that he leases as taxicabs in Moscow, knew it was a terrible and expensive time for a breakdown. Prices for spare parts, if you even could find them, had spiralled out of control since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine two months earlier. “I understood that I was in a bad situation,” he said. “I thought: the repairs are going to cost as much as the car.” Dealerships were useless, he said....

The European Commission has launched a new project as part of its foreign policy tool to support the capabilities of the International Criminal Court (ICC) with 7.25 million euros. As the censor reports: reported by "European truth". This project, first announced by the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrel in Kiev, is part of the EU's efforts to combat impunity for international crimes around the world. In particular, it will help the ICC expand its investigative capabilities to respond to ongoing investigations into war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. "There can be no impunity for crimes committed under Russian...

Now they are trying to resume in court, calling their dismissal illegal. The Russian opposition edition of "Mediazone" writes about it, Censor.NET reports. We are talking about Rosguard soldiers. They were supposed to guard the streets of the captured cities, but instead found themselves at the forefront and refused to fight. The Kabardino-Balkarian Rosguard decided to leave Ukraine at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. They were stormed in Kharkiv. The occupiers were dissatisfied with this, as well as with the fact that they were not provided with adequate weapons and transport. "We had AK, PKK, DSR, ammunition for...

Russia has stolen around 600,000 tonnes of grain from occupied Ukrainian territory and exported some of it, the deputy head of Ukraine’s agricultural producers’ union said on Wednesday. Ukraine will demand Russia provide compensation for both the theft of the grain and the destruction of the property of farmers, Denys Marchuk, the head of the UAC. "To date, about 600,000 tonnes have been stolen from agricultural companies and taken to the temporarily occupied territory of the Crimean Peninsula and from there it moves to ports, in particular to Sevastopol, and from there, ships go to the Middle East," Marchuk said....

This research was conducted in the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute.: As targets of information aggression, the United States and its European allies must protect themselves against the effects of psychological manipulation and influence. The authors describe apparent efforts by Russia and its agents to use information to shape Russia's operating environment, and they identify possible defensive approaches for United States European Command and its partners. Research Questions: 1- What content is produced and disseminated by Russia and its agents? 2- How do Russia and its agents manipulate information? 3- What is...

Russia's army could collapse amid huge losses of more than 30,000 troops in Ukraine, according to a confidential UK report that emerged on Monday. While Moscow's latest estimated troop losses make grim reading for President Vladimir Putin, the report claims he sees them as a 'price worth paying' for victory. However, the new report - a secretive analysis of Putin's brutal invasion seen by The Mirror - claims that the losses could be too great for his soldiers, amid other reports that Russian morale is low. Latest estimates from the Ukraine's Armed Forces suggest as many as 30,350 Russian soldiers...

Two more Russian colonels have been killed in Russia’s war in Ukraine - including the country’s 'best paratroop commander'. Lieutenant colonel Alexander Dosyagayev, 34, was a commander of an airborne assault battalion of the 104th paratrooper regiment. Troops from his 104th air assault regiment were reportedly in Bucha, the scene of alleged rape and torture atrocities committed by Vladimir Putin’s forces earlier in the war. His battalion based in Pskov had been recognised as the best in Russia in its extensive combat training and military discipline.

A Ukrainian air force MiG-29 fighter shot down one of the Russian air force’s best jets—an Su-35—near Russian-occupied Kherson on Friday, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry. The dramatic shoot-down, which reportedly took place as the Su-35 was chasing down Ukrainian attack planes, signaled an even more dramatic development on the ground. Ukrainian army formations supported by American-made M-777 howitzers crossed the Inhulets River around the town of Davydiv Brid, 50 miles northeast of Kherson. The Russians fell back to a trio of towns a few miles to the southwest. Towns whose defenses the Ukrainian general staff described as...