Free Republic

In the course of his lengthy annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly this year, President Vladimir Putin excoriated the United States for abandoning the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty while asserting that “the work on promising prototypes and weapon systems that I spoke about in my Address last year continues as scheduled and without disruptions.” Putin went on to say that Russia had entered serial production of the Avangard hypersonic glide system, which was to be deployed later in 2019. He added that the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, which he asserted was “of unprecedented power,” was in the...

The Russian capital has been the site of the biggest anti-government protests in years after authorities last month barred more than a dozen opposition politicians from taking part in a Moscow city election. Police have briefly detained over 2,000 people, sometimes violently, at rallies that the authorities said were illegal. “The main task at the job is to protect public order and ensure public safety at mass gatherings in Moscow,” reads the National Guard’s ad posted on Russia’s HeadHunter job site on Monday. The recruits will be required to “suppress ... uprisings, public-order crimes committed by groups and mass pogroms.”...

President Trump reportedly wanted to immediately and publicly acknowledge that U.S.-led forces engaged Russian mercenaries in Syria earlier this year, killing hundreds of them, but senior National Security Council staff, led then by H.R. McMaster, intervened, saying it would be unnecessarily antagonizing to Moscow. The president is said to have wanted White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to immediately acknowledged and “take credit” for fending off the Russian mercenaries.

In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle. With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations. This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we...

British authorities on Wednesday indicted two men for the March chemical-weapons attack on a former Russian double agent on British soil. The new details add to the evidence that Vladimir Putin’s regime is responsible, but its reckless methods are the real stunner. Police and prosecutors allege the men they identify as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov—almost certainly pseudonyms—arrived at London’s Gatwick airport on Friday, March 2, smuggling the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok in a small counterfeit perfume bottle. They ferried the chemical on suburban trains and the Tube through central London to a hotel, where nonfatal quantities of Novichok were...

On one of the nights of the last week of last June, the Syrian security forces imposed strict measures inside and around Damascus International Airport. Just before midnight, a private UAE plane landed on one of the runways. About forty minutes passed before a huge procession of black Four-Wheel vehicles took off carrying the passengers to the Mezzeh area, in the center of Damascus, where the new office of Major General Ali Mamlouk, director of Syria’s National Security Bureau is located. There, a senior US officer led a delegation that included officers from several US intelligence and security agencies. Ali...

Russia has been accused of interfering in the affairs of the Czech Republic after its embassy tried to block changes to the inscription on a Soviet-era statue explaining the chequered role of Russian Marshal Ivan Konev, who was twice designated a Hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin and whose remains are buried in the Kremlin. Now the dispute is set to come to a head at a historically sensitive moment, the 50th anniversary of the 1968 invasion of then-communist Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led forces to crush the liberal Prague Spring. Critics said the original plaque exaggerated the marshalÂ’s role while...

Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in the UK in the first three months of this year, the Home Office has admitted. It agreed only to resettle Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), despite past US declarations that Isis was committing genocide against them. The disclosure was obtained by the Barnabas Fund, a charity that supports persecuted Christians, under freedom of information laws after a protracted tussle with the Home Office.

Russia cannot compel Iranian forces to quit Syria, Moscow's ambassador to Tel Aviv said on Monday, rebuffing Israel's long-standing demand that it should work to ensure their total withdrawal from the country. "They are playing a very, very important role in our common and joint effort to eliminate terrorists in Syria," Ambassador Anatoly Viktorov told Israel's Channel 10 television in an interview. "That is why, for this period of time, we see as non-realistic any demands to expel any foreign troops from the entirety of the Syrian Arab Republic," he said. "We can talk with our Iranian partners very frankly...

Russia’s ambassador to Israel said in an interview Monday his country cannot force Iranian forces to withdraw from Syria, despite Israeli calls for Iran to withdraw from the country. Speaking with Channel 10 news, Anatoly Viktorov said the Iranians are “playing a very, very important role in our common and joint efforts to eliminate terrorists in Syria. Viktorov said Russia can talk to its “Iranian friends” about a full withdrawal from Syria, as Israel demands, but “we cannot force them.” “The Iranian presence in Syria… is fully legitimate according to the UN principles and the UN charter,” he added. He...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday attacked U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman as a "son of a dog" and a "settler." Abbas' attack on Friedman came during a Palestinian leadership meeting where Abbas once again criticized President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Times of Israel reports. Abbas added that Trump "views the settlements as legitimate," a reference to Israeli settlements on areas of land considered by Palestinians to be their own. Abbas used the point on settlements, which the PA views as illegal, as a segway to attack Friedman. "More than one...