Free Republic

The withdrawal of Russian forces from a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine has prompted two powerful allies of President Vladimir Putin to do something rare in modern Russia: publicly ridicule the war machine's top brass. Russia's loss of the bastion of Lyman, which puts western parts of Luhansk region under threat, touched a nerve for Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. Kadyrov, who has been close to Putin since his father and former president of Chechnya, Akhmad, was killed in a 2004 bomb attack in Grozny that also killed a Reuters photographer, suggested that...

Few nations have as deep a sense of their own history as the Russians. On the basis of this tendentious tract about historic 'unity' of Russians and Ukrainians that President Putin justified his invasion of an independent neighboring state. But another word, also with great resonance in Russian history, now hangs over the Kremlin's flailing military campaign. And that word is: MUTINY. Remarkably, it was raised on Moscow's main TV channel by the woman described as Putin's propagandist-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, on the state of the 'special military operation' to a Russian audience. She was raging about the incompetence which Putin's...