Free Republic

The Kremlin says it’s confident that Russian President Vladimir Putin will win the 2024 presidential election if he decides to run for another term in office. Neither Putin, 71, nor the Kremlin has confirmed he will run for another six-year term in office -snip- Senior Russian official Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, told CNBC that though there has been no formal announcement that Putin will run for reelection, he believes the president will win the vote set to be held in March. “There has been no formal announcement yet. But I have no doubt that if he puts forward...

Ukraine could soon face a tough decision over tactically withdrawing from Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region, as the fate of the city hangs in balance. Bakhmut has been intensely fought over by Russian and Ukrainian forces for months, with Moscow viewing its capture as a strategic goal and a way to cut Ukrainian supply lines in Donetsk. Russian officials recently claimed that Moscow’s forces have almost entirely encircled Bakhmut. On Wednesday, one special forces commander said Russian troops now occupied several streets in the city. Ukraine disputes how far Russia has advanced into Bakhmut, although it concedes – in...

When Volodymyr Zelenskyy became the president of Ukraine in 2019, it made headlines around the world. That wasn’t because he was a political heavyweight deemed ready to resolve Ukraine’s deep-seated challenges —ranging from an economic crisis to corruption and an entrenched, powerful oligarchy — not to mention the conflict between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country. It was just the opposite. Zelenskyy was a political novice whose closest brush with politics was playing the role of Ukrainian president in a well-known domestic TV series, before life imitated art and he decided to launch his own...

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, nobody in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle is believed to have expected the war to last more than a few months. As the weather turns cold once again, and back to the freezing and muddy conditions that Russia’s invading forces experienced at the start of the conflict, Moscow faces what’s likely to be months more fighting, military losses and potential defeat. That, Russian political analysts say, will be catastrophic for Putin and the Kremlin, who have banked Russia’s global capital on winning the war against Ukraine. They told CNBC that anxiety was rising in...

Ukrainian forces have counted more gains on the battlefield, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailing more “good news from the front lines” in his nightly address Tuesday. Rapid and significant gains have been counted in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south in particular, with advances in the Kherson region. Now, dozens of settlements have been liberated this week across four regions that Russia “annexed” last week, Zelenskyy said. Moscow’s hold on “annexed” territories (Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk) looks increasingly tenuous, with none of the regions fully occupied by Russian forces, and as Ukraine’s counteroffensives in the east and south maintain their...