Free Republic

Up to 50,000 Russian soldiers could be missing in action in Ukraine, a senior defence official who is related to President Putin has revealed in an apparent slip-up. Anna Tsivileva, a deputy defence minister, told a parliamentary roundtable that there had been tens of thousands of requests for DNA testing to identify the remains of servicemen. “We accept the DNA of relatives, as I have said, free of charge,” Tsivileva said. “[There are] 48,000 relatives who have applied to us.” However, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the parliamentary defence committee, stressed that the figures cited by Tsivileva were classified and...

Russian MPs have voted unanimously to ban any form of sex change, with President Putin’s allies claiming that the move was necessary to defend the motherland against “western anti-family ideology”. The bill, which was approved in its first reading, will prohibit “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person” and “the state registration of a change of gender without an operation”. Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, said that the law would “erect a barrier” against what Putin had described as a western threat to the country’s “traditional values”. “I really want the guys who are...

The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure. Since daily assaults on civilians began in October, the Pentagon has revised its threat assessment of the war in Ukraine. Crucially, this includes new judgments about whether arms shipments to Kyiv might lead to a military confrontation between Russia and Nato. This represents a significant development in the nine-month war between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington now likelier to supply Kyiv with longer-range weapons. “We’re still using the same escalatory calculations but the fear of...