Free Republic

Three months after Russia’s brutal months-long siege of Mariupol came to an end, life hangs by a thread for those who stayed behind. Russian airstrikes and artillery pounded Mariupol, reducing what was once a vibrant port city into a landscape of rubble. More than 20,000 people are believed to have been killed in Russia’s siege but the real number could be much higher, according to the Mariupol City Council. There are mass graves with unidentified bodies outside of the city. Though incessant shelling ceased after the last Ukrainian stronghold in Mariupol fell to Russia in mid-May, those who survived the...

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland? If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki's defense and fight Russia on Finland's side. What does Finland's membership in NATO mean for America? If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world's largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons. No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment -- to risk the...

Danila Davydov said he left Russia within weeks of the Kremlin sending troops into Ukraine because he feared having to fight in a war he doesn't support. The 22-year-old left St. Petersburg and is now working in Kazakhstan."We feared President Putin would declare a mobilization and then everyone, young and old, would be called up to the army. I absolutely didn't want to go and fight." Davydov is among what some lawyers and rights advocates say is an increased number of young Russian men looking to avoid the country's mandatory military service since the conflict with Ukraine, which Russia calls...

Consider the Buryats, one of Siberia’s largest Indigenous groups. Closely related to Mongolians, they were subjugated, annexed, and subsequently colonized by Russia in the 1600s. Russian independent news outlets Mediazona and iStories found that by mid-May, Buryatia had the second-highest number of soldiers killed in Ukraine since the start of the invasion—just after Dagestan, another conquest of the Russian Empire. By May 18, Buryatia had lost 117 soldiers (the actual number is likely higher), whereas the city of Moscow, with a population around 15 times Buryatia’s, lost only three. Relative to the population, Buryatia’s rate of battle deaths was the...

Oleg Moskalenko, a Ukrainian businessman and university professor from a town on the outskirts of Kyiv, was taken prisoner by Russian forces in early March, then was tortured and interrogated for a week before being set free in the middle of a forest and eventually finding his way back to safety. Moskalenko, 53, detailed the ordeal in an interview with Fox News Digital from Warsaw, Poland, where he is currently recovering after losing multiple fingers, a third of his right foot, and three toes on his left foot.