Free Republic

The Kremlin promised entertainment.Western analysts feared Vladimir Putin would declare another war.But the Russian president’s more than two-hour-long address on Thursday delivered on neither expectation, though Putin presented Russians with a vision of the future that alternated between nuclear saber-rattling and grand social promises. ###Putin, who cut a relaxed figure, also called for the safeguarding of “traditional family values.”“We see what is happening in some countries where moral norms and family institutions are deliberately being destroyed, pushing entire peoples to extinction and degeneration,” he said. “We choose life.”

Officials in Moldova’s Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria appealed to Moscow for protection Wednesday, as tensions escalate with the pro-Western government. ... On Wednesday, members of the Transnistrian congress used a rare meeting in the regional capital, Tiraspol, to ask the Russian Duma to “implement measures for defending Transnistria amid increasing pressure from Moldova, given the fact that more than 220,000 Russian citizens reside in Transnistria." A short war in the early 1990s led pro-Russian forces in Transnistria to declare a breakaway state. To this day, Russia stations about 1,500 troops in the region as so-called peacekeepers, who guard huge...

Tucker Carlson 2/25/24 : Into the abyss: Colonel Douglas Macgregor tells us why the Ukraine war must end now.