Free Republic

USA has paused a $14bn arms sale to Taiwan, amid significant pressure from China. The shipment was expected to include equipment vital to the island’s defence, but just a week after Trump visited Beijing for meetings with Xi, the deal has been put on hold. US said it was pausing the deal because it needed to preserve its stockpile for the war in Iran – but in the same message, it insisted it still had enough weapons. Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, said: “Right now we’re doing a pause in order to make sure we have the munitions...

In 2020, just 246 people tried to sneak into Poland from Belarus through the marshy wetlands on the border, according to the Polish government’s records. There was a pandemic on, after all. But over the following year, almost 40,000 migrants from Syria, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, India and other countries crossed or attempted to cross this frontier. Those migrants didn’t end up in Belarus by accident. Some were carrying Russian visas or entry stamps. Russia and its ally — some would say lackey — Belarus were, in effect, importing migrants, delivering them to the Polish-Belarusian border and telling them to head...

Two senior Polish defense ministry officials are on their way to Washington to get more information on why the U.S. suddenly canceled the deployment of 4,000 soldiers on a planned rotation to the country. Paweł Zalewski and Cezary Tomczyk — both deputy defense ministers — will try to get details on what Zalewski called "the incident." "No one in Poland knew that the rotation of the American brigade would be suspended," Zalewski told TOK FM radio on Monday morning. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth blindsided Warsaw by halting the long-planned deployment of soldiers with the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st...

MOSCOW, May 14 (Reuters) - Russia is establishing a "full-fledged partnership" with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and is encouraging ‌other countries in the region to expand cooperation ‌with Kabul, a senior Russian security official was quoted on Thursday ​as saying. Russia last year became the first country to formally recognise the Islamist Taliban government that seized power in August 2021 as U.S.-led forces staged a chaotic withdrawal ‌from Afghanistan after ⁠20 years of war. Interfax news agency quoted Russian official Sergei Shoigu as saying cooperation ⁠with Kabul was important for the security and development of the region. Shoigu, who is secretary...

Russia pummeled Ukraine’s capital with hundreds of drones and missiles early Thursday, the latest in a string of deadly Russian strikes this week. The attacks suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin had little intention of de-escalating his war, after he declared recently that he believed it was “coming to a close.” Explosions shook Kyiv, the capital, over several hours Thursday morning as Ukrainian forces tried to intercept and shoot down the drones and missiles, some of which evaded overwhelmed air-defense systems. The attack included cruise and ballistic missiles that Moscow often stockpiles for mass bombardments. As the sun rose, rescue...

More than a dozen airports across southern Russia suspended operations on Friday morning, while hundreds of flights were either cancelled or delayed after a Ukrainian drone crashed into the air traffic control center for the region, transportation authorities said. The strike damaged equipment at the control center in Rostov-on-Don, which manages aviation for southern Russia, the Transportation Ministry said. No one was reported injured, but the attack forced the center to suspend work. As a result, airports in southern Russia halted operations, including in the cities of Astrakhan, Vladikavkaz, Volgograd, Gelendzhik, Grozny, Krasnodar, Makhachkala, Magas, Mineralnye Vody, Nalchik, Sochi, Stavropol...

If symbolism matters, and in Russia it always has, then today’s Victory Day parade on Red Square spoke volumes. The absence of tanks grinding across the sacred cobblestones was not merely an omission; it was an admission. A regime that once flaunted military might before the world could muster neither armour, missiles, nor meaningful battlefield hardware for its most important national spectacle. For a country that has built so much of its modern identity around martial power, this was less a celebration of victory than a carefully stage-managed display of strategic exhaustion. When Vladimir Putin resurrected and expanded the Victory...

There were no neat rows of tanks or ballistic missile carriers rolling down the smooth cobbles of Moscow’s Red Square on Saturday, as Russia scaled back what is usually a grand militaristic Victory Day parade celebrating the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany. 'Victory has always been and will be ours,” Putin said, addressing columns of troops. He vowed to fight on in Ukraine North Korean troops marched in the parade for the first time, a visible sign of Moscow’s deepening partnership with Pyongyang that has resulted in the deployment of over 10,000 troops to fight the war in...

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar held his first international press conference after the 12 April election, which resulted in a supermajority victory for his Tisza Party. During the three-hour-long briefing, Magyar outlined key policies of the future government, including several aspects of foreign policy. ‘Hungary’s history is written by the Hungarian people, not in Moscow, not in Brussels, and not in Washington,’ he stressed, asking other countries to regard Hungary as a ‘free, independent and sovereign European country’ that is a member of the European Union and NATO. Magyar added that, under a Tisza government, Hungary will not ‘interfere in...

March 1 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that the changes in Iran ‌brought about by U.S. and Israeli strikes ‌should be "used properly" to benefit the country's people who had ​withstood violence from their authorities. Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said Iran's authorities had killed "tens of thousands of people in the last couple of ‌months alone," referring ⁠to a crackdown on protests. Iran, he said, had "predetermined the way it is treated" ⁠by supplying attack drones to Russia in Moscow's four-year-old conflict in Ukraine and had also "fomented wars ​in the ​region." "It...