Free Republic

Germany is preventing fellow NATO member Estonia from providing Ukraine with military support by declining to offer export permits for weapons of German origin, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. "Germany, they have a lot of hesitation to deliver to us," Ukraine's defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, told The Journal. A German government spokesperson explained to the outlet that the decision on the exportation of weaponry is a result of a long-standing policy. "The principle governing arms exports is always the same—whether they come directly from Germany or from third countries—and no permission has been issued at this stage," the...

If Russia launches a further invasion of Ukraine, as U.S. officials increasingly fear, its advance deeper into the country is likely to be complemented by missile salvos that would turn the skies above Kyiv, Ukraine, into an effective no-go zone: using short-range missiles to knock out Ukraine’s runways, airports, and fighters on the ground. In fact, Russia already appears to be sending its Iskander missiles—precision-guided munitions the Russian military has fired in Syria—to the front lines, covered in tarps, according to videos revealed on TikTok this week. Weapons experts were able to discern the contours of the Iskander missiles from...

MOSCOW, Jan 21 (Reuters) - The security guarantees that Russia seeks from the West include provisions requiring NATO forces to leave Romania and Bulgaria, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday.

The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announced on Wednesday, January 19, that France would send troops to Romania as part of NATO operations to ensure the security of the eastern alliance states, G4media.ro reported. The statement comes amid a security crisis on NATO's eastern flank. "We have sent troops to ensure the security of our European partners in NATO missions, to our friends in the Baltic area, and we will continue to do so. We have shown our readiness to move forward, within NATO, to engage in new missions and to take responsibility for "enhanced advanced presence" missions, especially in...

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz turned down an invite at short notice from U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the Ukraine crisis, German magazine Der Spiegel said on Friday. Scholz did not accept the invitation due to a full schedule, including a trip to Madrid, as well as the desire to show that he was present as Germany grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Der Spiegel. A government spokesman declined to comment on the report. Both sides hoped now to organize a meeting by mid-February.

The U.S. has given approval for three Baltic NATO members to send American-made weapons to Ukraine, U.S. officials said. The decision will enable Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia to send Javelin antitank weapons and Stinger air-defense systems for Ukraine’s forces. The Biden administration has also notified Congress that it intends to provide Ukraine with five Mi-17 transport helicopters, U.S. officials said. The Russian-made helicopters had been intended for Afghanistan’s military and were being repaired in Ukraine.

For nearly fifty years, from the end of World War II until 1992 millions of people in Eastern Europe endured the oppression and brutality of Communism, courtesy of the former Soviet Union. For decades Soviet Russia maintained control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, the Baltic and Balkan countries, and all of the ‘Stans’ with an iron fist. Tolerating no dissent in those countries, and responding brutally if it occurred. Ask the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968. In 1956 the Soviet Union sent troops and tanks to crush the Hungarian popular uprising, killing and wounding...

Whether or not Vladimir Putin moves his troops into Ukraine, he has once again confronted Europe with a most painful reality: while being too weak to defend itself, it can no longer rely on the United States to come to its rescue. We are facing a reality in which Russia, despite its economy only having the size of Italy's, can bully and intimidate a continent thanks to its energy reserves and its readiness to project vast military power. Sure, any Russian invasion of Ukraine would cost Russia a fortune and likely degrade into a grinding war of attrition. Invasion is...

"[American leaders] don’t think the balance of power matters any more…. If you think we’ve had trouble with the Russians, just wait for the trouble we are going to have with the Chinese. I am very popular in China. I go to China quite often. I usually start my talks by saying, ‘It’s good to be back among my people.’ Because when I get to China I’m intellectually more at home there than I am in Washington…." PROFESSOR JOHN MEARSHEIMER, 2016 Will there be a war over Ukraine? Have recent negotiations opened a path to peace? Unfortunately, the diplomats have...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet with his Russian counterpart in Switzerland this week as tensions between the U.S. and Russia escalate over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the State Department said Tuesday. The State Department said Blinken will travel to Kyiv on Wednesday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, move on to Berlin and then meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday. The hastily arranged trip aims to show U.S. support for Ukraine and impress on Russia the need for de-escalation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki underscored the urgency. “We’re now at a...

In 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to a U.S.-backed coup that ousted a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv by occupying Crimea, President Barack Obama did nothing. When Putin aided secessionists in the Donbass in seizing Luhansk and Donetsk, once again, Obama did nothing. Why did we not come to the military assistance of Ukraine? Because Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We had no obligation to come to its aid. And to have intervened militarily on the side of Ukraine would have risked a war with Russia we had no desire to fight. Last year, when Putin marshaled...

Russia again expects the US and EU countries to provide written responses to demands for security guarantees related to NATO's refusal to expand to the east. In particular, this was stated by Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov, who shared his own assessment of the results of his country's dialogue with the United States in an interview with Newsweek. "It must be admitted that the discussions held last week with the United States and NATO have not yet yielded any significant results. We expect written responses from Washington and Brussels to our draft agreements. Based on them, we will make...

Poland's foreign minister said on Thursday that Europe was at risk of plunging into war as Russia said it was not yet giving up on diplomacy but that military experts were preparing options in case tensions over Ukraine could not be defused. In Washington, the White House said the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine remained high with some 100,000 Russian troops deployed and the United States would make public within 24 hours intelligence suggesting Russia might seek to invent a pretext to justify one. "The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill,"...

The US has intelligence that Russia is planning a 'false-flag' operation on its own forces in eastern Ukraine to create a pretext for invasion. Officials on Friday also said they believed Russia was mounting a social media disinformation campaign to portray Ukraine as the aggressor. The update, making the prospect of military conflict more immediate, came as Ukrainian government websites were taken offline in a 'massive' cyberattack, talks between Washington and Moscow collapsed and Russia held a combat readiness inspection of their troops. Meanwhile, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had 'run out of patience' with the West as...

In 1961, as a young academic Henry Kissinger had an opportunity to interview President Harry Truman. He asked the former president what in his presidency had made him most proud. Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations.” Unfortunately, the U.S. chose not to emulate Truman’s achievement in the years that followed. With the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the military threat to Western Europe had ended, but NATO alliance did not disband itself. Mission accomplished was not good news for the military alliance — it needed new enemies and...

Ukraine was hit by a major cyberattack on the night of Jan. 13-14, crashing many government websites, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Veterans Affairs, State Emergency Service, Cabinet of Ministers, Ministry of Energy, and the Ministry of Education and Science. The website of Diia, Ukraine’s e-governance website and app which allows Ukrainians to access their digital documents like passports and driving licenses, was also down on the morning of Jan. 14. The message on the website said it was under maintenance. The Diia app worked normally. The content of the sites was not changed, and no personal...

Russia on Thursday sharply raised the stakes in its dispute with the West over Ukraine, with a top diplomat refusing to rule out a Russian military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela if tensions with the United States mount. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who led the Russian delegation in Monday’s talks with the U.S. in Geneva, said he could “neither confirm nor exclude” the possibility of Russia sending military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if the talks fail and U.S. pressure on Russia mounts. The Russia-U.S. negotiations in Geneva and a subsequent NATO-Russia meeting failed to narrow the gap on...

There is a real possibility that the European Union (EU) will endure major fuel shortages this winter. Record-high electricity prices are currently the norm with no end in sight. Russian president Vladimir Putin astutely understands that the EU heavily relies on Russian natural gas, which the Nord Stream 1 and now 2 (NS2) natural gas pipeline will provide. This $11 billion line to the German coast spanning 764 miles under the Baltic Sea will double the capacity of Russian natural gas and be used as a geopolitical leverage point against Ukraine, Poland, NATO, the EU, and most of all Germany,...

An undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time. The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and...

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the breakup of the USSR began. But the dissolution did not stop with the 14 Soviet "republics" declaring their independence of Moscow. Decomposition had only just begun. Transnistria broke away from Moldova. South Ossetia and Abkhazia seceded from Georgia. Chechnya broke free of Russia but was restored to Moscow's control after two savage wars. Crimea and the Donbass were severed from Ukraine. Besides these post-Cold War amputations, assisted by Russia, what do Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia have in common? All seek admission to NATO, and with it Article...