Free Republic

Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has urged Washington’s chief negotiator with Moscow, Steve Witkoff, to consult European leaders before placing trust in Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Witkoff has been part of U.S. delegations leading talks with Moscow and Kyiv since February, after Trump tasked members of his administration to help negotiate an end to Russia’s three-year war in Ukraine. However, he has faced criticism from Kyiv for peddling Russian narratives, including a suggestion to hand over four partially occupied eastern Ukrainian regions to Moscow. In March, Witkoff said that Putin has no intention to “take all of...

President Donald Trump has had a simple and bold plan to win the peace in the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine. In my opinion, Trump knew getting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians to negotiate was never going to be the problem. But Russian President Vladimir Putin would be. So Trump seemingly castigated the Ukrainians at the very same time he extended a very welcoming hand to Putin, a nonthreatening and nonjudgmental one at that. Trump's maneuver was a brilliant one, including a peace deal that would start with both sides agreeing to an immediate ceasefire. As expected, Zelenskyy...

Vladimir Putin is demanding urgent potato imports from Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, while he delays supplying the ally with promised notorious Oreshnik horror missiles. Putin has made the shameful admission that he has run out of spuds - one of his country’s leading food staples - amid economic meltdown during his war with Ukraine. It now appears Belarus will not get the lethal missiles until after Lukashenko supplies Putin with new exports of potatoes which have spiralled in prices in Russia. The Minsk tyrant has even cancelled sanctions against imports from the EU to stock up to supply Russia. -snip-...

Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko called on Wednesday for the country to produce more potatoes in the face of a large shortage of the key crop and rising demand from neighbouring Russia. "We have to grow enough so that it suffices for us and for Russia," Lukashenko said during a meeting with regional officials in Minsk, state news agency BelTA reported. The potato has in the past been seen as a symbol of Lukashenko's rule of the country, which is heavily dependant on agriculture. He was once head of a state-run collective farm, or sovkhoz. Food shortages have arisen recently in...

The Kremlin has not yet disclosed what conditions it will propose for a ceasefire with Ukraine, nor whether those terms will appear in a draft memorandum, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Peskov noted that there is no need to publicly discuss the contents of the draft documents, News.Az reports, citing TASS. "We won’t publicly discuss the contents of the draft documents that [the parties] are supposed to exchange. The reason is because talks should always be held behind closed doors rather than in public," the Kremlin spokesman added.

President Trump appeared to give Vladimir Putin a hard deadline for ending the war in Ukraine — as the Kremlin revealed Thursday the Russian leader has no plans to pow wow with the commander-in-chief. “We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not, and if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half to two weeks,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday. Asked whether Putin wanted to end the war, Trump said, “I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know in...

Investigators report that one in four hypersensitivity pneumonitis cases in their interstitial lung disease registry could be traced back to mold inside patients' homes, identifying chronic exposure to residential mold as a potential source of severe immune-mediated lung condition. Household exposure has been associated with a range of illnesses, including asthma, chronic rhinosinusitis, and allergic bronchopulmonary mycosis. Physicians are often unable to connect residential environments with patient symptoms, in part due to limited diagnostic tools. Without clear exposure histories or validated testing methods, the role of mold in respiratory disease remains easy to miss. In the study, researchers retrospectively examined...