Free Republic

They have become a familiar sight in the skies above parts of Russia: long-range enemy drones, buzzing their way to another target. In the biggest Ukrainian onslaught inside Russian territory since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion two years ago, Ukraine has in recent weeks carried out a series of attacks on Russian oil refineries and ports. On Tuesday, it hit a refinery and drone factory in the industrial region of Tatarstan - more than 800 miles from the border. The Ukrainian spy agency behind these drone strikes has its eyes on another target: the 12-mile long Kerch bridge connecting occupied Crimea...

It was a moment of humiliation for Moscow. The headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet – a building of elegant white columns overlooking the Crimean port of Sevastopol – was ablaze. Smoke billowed into a blue sky. First one, and then a second Storm Shadow missile slammed into its roof. Video captured the impact: a precise, deadly, thunderous strike. The attack on 22 September killed 34 officers, including Viktor Sokolov, the fleet’s commander, according to Ukraine. Russia denied this, releasing footage of Sokolov, suggesting he was still alive. Whatever the truth of the admiral’s fate, the blow deep into enemy...

At 5am on Wednesday Serhii Melnikov heard a noise outside. The Russian soldiers who were living in the house opposite – were packing up to leave. They had occupied the village of Mylove in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region for eight months. Now they were off, as part of a humiliating pull-out from the right-bank of the Dnipro river. “Vladimir Putin said Russia would be here for ever. In the end they left in five minutes and ran away like goats,Putin wanted to kill us. He’s ended up destroying his own country. Russia’s retreat from Kherson is an enormous failure.” ...The...

Things are disappearing in the Ukrainian city of Kherson at a rapid rate. Some are physical objects. Russian troops are taking away ambulances, tractors and stolen private cars. Cultural things are going too: archives, and paintings and sculptures from the art and local lore museums. Even the bones of Catherine the Great’s friend and lover, Grigory Potemkin, have been grubbed up from a crypt in St Catherine’s cathedral and spirited away. Russian soldiers are ferrying this loot across the Dnieper river, to the left bank of the Kherson region. They have also been deporting local citizens under the guise of...

A former member of Russia’s Duma who was expelled for anti-Kremlin activities has claimed that Russian partisans were allegedly behind a car bomb which blew up the daughter of one of Vladimir Putin’s close political allies on the outskirts of Moscow (Darya Dugina, daughter of Alexander Dugin). Speaking in Kyiv, where he is based, Ilya Ponomarev alleged the explosion on Saturday evening was the work of the National Republican Army, which he claimed was an underground group working inside Russia and dedicated to overthrowing the Putin regime... Ponomarev said partisans inside Russia were ready to conduct further similar attacks against...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

Though she doesn’t often bring it up these days, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow remembers how the media abetted the Bush administration’s lies justifying the 2003 Iraq invasion. That was when elite (in many cases handpicked) journalists spent months serving as stenographers for the push to war, parroting every carefully crafted leak without question. They dismissed skeptics as disloyal and spiked stories that would have raised questions about the narrative. When they got caught, they declared “never again.” Yet with Rachel Maddow as their poster child (along with David Corn, Luke Harding, Chris Hayes, the entire staff at CNN, and hundreds more),...

Congressional investigations into the Trump dossier have so far been focused on the FBI and Justice Department. They still are, but now investigators are also looking into a possible Obama State Department role in the collection and dissemination of sensational and still-unverified allegations against candidate Donald Trump gathered by a former British spy working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. In addition to having contacts in the Obama Justice Department and FBI, that former spy, Christopher Steele, was also well-connected with the Obama State Department. A book published in November by a correspondent at the Guardian, "Collusion: Secret meetings, dirty money,...