Free Republic

CAIRO (AP) — A Russian-flagged tanker carrying liquefied natural gas exploded and erupted in flames before sinking in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, authorities in the North African country said Wednesday. No casualties were reported.The tanker was under Western sanctions, suspected to be part of Russia’s shadow fleet of energy tankers trying to bypass sanctions imposed on Moscow over its war in Ukraine. The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear. According to the Libyan Maritime Authority, there was a “sudden explosions, followed by a massive fire” on the Arctic Metagaz on Tuesday while the LNG...

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...

Ukraine is outmatched by Russian forces and requires significantly more infantry and weapons if it hopes to win the war, according to military intelligence and independent battlefield monitors. Although Moscow is paying an extraordinary price for comparatively minimal gains, western officials believe the country can sustain at least another year of war at the current rate of attrition. On Tuesday it will be four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After months of incremental advances, it appears to be on the verge of capturing a series of strategic locations in Ukraine’s so-called “fortress belt” and is expanding...

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone — the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbor is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland. After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost....

Hungary will block a 90-billion-euro ($106 billion) EU loan for Ukraine until it resumes oil shipments to the country via the Druzhba pipeline, its foreign minister said on Friday after Budapest said it would tap strategic reserves to tackle a shortage. Hungary and Slovakia, which have the only remaining refineries in the European Union using Russian oil through Druzhba, have been trying to secure supply since flows were halted on January 27 following what Ukraine said was a Russian drone attack that damaged pipeline infrastructure. Both countries have blamed Ukraine for the delay in restarting the flows for political reasons.