Free Republic

Chechnya's strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov has raised and dismissed a rumor about Russian President Vladimir Putin's health. In an audio recording posted Wednesday to his Telegram social media channel, Kadyrov said that he had "read that our president had fallen into a coma" and that "they are looking for a replacement right now." Since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, there has been much speculation about whether the Russian president is ill. Scenes of him gripping the edge of a table on April 21 during a meeting with his defense minister Sergei Shoigu added to the rumor...

A request for Russian military assistance from the head of a Moscow-backed rebel in Ukraine's Donbas region has been batted away by the Kremlin. Facing fierce shelling from Ukrainian forces, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), requested additional assistance from the Russian government in a video published on his Telegram channel on Monday. Pushilin accused Kyiv of using "prohibited methods of warfare," and that the central districts of Donetsk were being shelled while other settlements in the republic were under fire. "In this regard, an understanding was reached that all the necessary additional forces of the...

Russia is scrambling to recruit men to fight in Ukraine after major losses in the early months of the war left the army stretched thin and some soldiers disenchanted. The Kremlin has so far declined to order a general mobilization of draft-age soldiers, because this could signal that the war is not proceeding as well as depicted in the Russian media and threaten to stir grass-roots resistance to the military campaign.