Free Republic

It was a piece of news so obscure and implausible that I missed it when it first surfaced last month. The news was that the Russians are going to put hypersonic nuclear missiles into Nicaragua and terrify the Americans into backing down over Ukraine. Or kill them all if they don’t.“If American missile systems can nearly reach Moscow from Ukrainian territory, it’s time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American ‘city on a hill,’” Olga Skabeyeva said on the news show on “Rossiya-1,” the most popular Russian TV channel.Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega published a decree last...

A detailed list of the destroyed and captured vehicles and equipment of both sides can be seen below. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available

After some early hesitation over concerns the systems could be used by Ukrainian forces against Russian territory, reluctantly drawing the U.S. into the fight, Washington said it would initially send four Himars to Ukraine, and train Ukrainian forces to use them. These advanced systems are mobile launchers capable of striking targets from a maximum distance ranging from about 60 kilometers to nearly 500 kilometers depending on the type of ammunition used. “We needed to persuade them, to show them proof,” said Mr. Reznikov. “In the Izyum case, we were precise [in targeting] a Russian command center for aerial operations. It...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stormed off and headed home early after being snubbed by other diplomats at the G20 summit — who refused to take a group photo with him over his nation’s invasion of Ukraine. Foreign ministers who gathered in Bali, Indonesia, this week, did not pose for a traditional “family”-style group photo, after several of them reportedly refused to be pictured with Vladimir Putin’s chief envoy. The Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken led the photo-op boycott.

Russia’s capture of the strategic city of Lysychansk means the front line in Ukraine’s east will shift as Russian forces regroup before pushing further south and west, military analysts and Ukrainian officers said Sunday, ensuring that the next phase of the battle will be just as bloody as the last. To take Lysychansk and its neighboring city of Sievierodonetsk, Russian forces moved in from the north, east and west and created a pocket of territory that became indefensible toward the end of June. Now those Russian forces are in a position to attempt a similar maneuver on other Ukrainian-held cities...