Free Republic

A Christian woman has brought a landmark case to court in St Petersburg after challenging authorities for fining her 10,000 rubles (£122) after she hosted worship services for her protestant church in her home. Olga Glamozdinova, who allowed a congregation to gather for weekly worship sessions at her house in the southern village of Veselyi said the decision violated her rights to freedom of religious expression and her right to freely own and dispose of her property. According to Christian aid agency Barnabas Fund, the church was registered at her property which is built on land designated for "private farming"...

Russia is preparing an "asymmetric" response to the increase in NATO troop rotation in Eastern Europe, and in particular the United States' military presence near Russian borders, Russia's ambassador to NATO said on March 31. "Of course, our response will be completely asymmetrical. It will be calibrated to match our ideas about the degree of military threat, to be most efficient and not overly expensive," Alexandr Grushko said on Rossiya-24 television. "We can see that the U.S. continues to increase its military presence in Europe with an emphasis on the Eastern front... We are not passive observers. We consistently implement...

<p>The internet troll army’s selling of the Kremlin’s parallel universe to the Russian people and to a skeptical Western audience is a matter of life and death for the Putin regime. If the Russian people do not buy their story, Putin loses the high “ratings” on which his regime rests. If he cannot convince his Western audience, Europe and the United States will take actions that spoil his Novorossiya ventures and threaten his regime. Trolling is a high stakes business that Putin takes seriously and the West must not underestimate.</p>

Russian President Vladimir Putin said November 4 that he sees nothing wrong with the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact that the Soviet Union made with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany just days before World War ii broke out. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a promise of non-belligerence by either party toward the other. Just a week after it was signed, Germany invaded Poland, officially igniting World War ii. “Serious research must show that those were the foreign policy methods then,” Putin said to a group of young historians in Moscow. “The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany. People say: ‘Ach, that’s bad.’...

Ukrainian army with combat forces took Marinku and went out to the outskirts of the city. This edition of "Donetsk news". Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack on the terrorists forces and occupied intersections "Donetsk-Gorlovka-slavyansk, in which stood the European post of TRAFFIC POLICE, and now had a fortified outpost of DNR. Above post already flies Ukrainian flag. According to eyewitnesses, the brutal battle destroyed two terrorist outpost in Marinka. "They literally tore into the trash" - they write. With access to the outskirts of Donetsk region "Trudovskaya", named in honor of the mine, the battle has not stopped. The...

Online synchronization process began protests in Russia. Kremlin in a panic Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg ... Who's next? Vilnius, August 2 (New Region, Darius Sadkovskaya) - In Internet networks began the process of synchronization of protests in Russia's regions. Apparently, he will start on August 17. Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg ... Who's next This week in social networks and mass media information was reported that 17 Agusta take place in Novosibirsk "March for the federalization of Siberia" under the slogan "Stop feeding Moscow». \ This is on his page on "Facebook" said well-known Russian journalist Arthur Solomon. This week in social networks...

Dealing a defiant blow to the Kremlin, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine signed a long-delayed trade pact with Europe on Friday that Moscow had bitterly opposed. He then declared he would like his country to one day become a full member of the European Union. In so doing, Ukraine’s new leader, a billionaire confectionary magnate, has in effect raised a risky bet on the West that has cost his country hundreds of lives and the loss of the Crimean peninsula to Russia and has set off a low-level civil war in its eastern border region. By signing the trade...

Men of action cut a large figure in the history books, but it is the ideas placed in their heads by men of thought that actually determine what they do. Thus the scribblings of mad philosophers can lead to the deaths of millions. As the modern-day heir to this tradition, Alexander Dugin bids fair to break the record. Most Americans don’t know anything about Alexander Dugin. They need to, because Dugin is the mad philosopher who is redesigning the brains of much of the Russian government and public, filling their minds with a new hate-ridden totalitarian ideology whose consequences can...

A group of MPs representing both majority and opposition parties have asked Russia’s Prosecutor General to probe the events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. They view possible action against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the letter, signed by two MPs from United Russia, two Communists and one representative of populist nationalist party LDPR, the parliamentarians claim that at the March 1991referendum the majority of Soviet citizens voted that their country should remain united, and therefore the actions of several top officials that led to USSR breakup were unlawful. They also noted that in November 1991 the...

Satellite images which appear to show Russian warplanes, combat helicopters, armour, artillery near Ukraine's border have been released. The organisation's top military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove said a probable airborne or special forces brigade deployement could also be spotted on the pictures as Russian armed forces maintained their presence the area's military bases.

ZURICH, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The Swiss government said it will order banks to freeze any funds in Swiss banks found to be linked to ousted President Viktor Yanukovich. "The federal council decided yesterday to freeze any Yanukovich funds found in Switzerland," government spokesman Andre Simonazzi said in an emailed statement.

Top lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services said Thursday that the world would be better off if the Cold War was still on—and if Obama wasn’t cutting the defense budget. The current crisis in the Ukraine and the looming crisis on the Korean Peninsula would be much easier to manage if the Cold War was still going strong, according to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Senate Armed Services Ranking Republican James Inhofe. “I look back wistfully at the Cold War,” Inhofe said Thursday at a breakfast meeting with reporters. “There were two superpowers, they knew...

MOSCOW, February 26 (RIA Novosti) – Russia is planning to expand its permanent military presence outside its borders by placing military bases in a number of foreign countries, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday. Shoigu said the list includes Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Seychelles, Singapore and several other countries. “The talks are under way, and we are close to signing the relevant documents,” Shoigu told reporters in Moscow. The minister added that the negotiations cover not only military bases but also visits to ports in such countries on favorable conditions as well as the opening of refueling sites for...

On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship. President Viktor Yanukovych, in having the deputies of his Party of Regions endorse an extraordinary packet of legislation, has arrogated decisive political power to himself. After hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians spent weeks in the cold demonstrating for basic human rights and a stronger association with Europe, the president has responded with a violation of human rights and a rather sad imitation of Russia. In procedure and content the laws “passed” by the Ukrainian parliament this week contravene the most basic rights of modern constitutional democracies: to speech, assembly, and representation. Although they...

MOSCOW — With mutual trust all but gone, the United States and Russia enter a new year full of challenges that will test whether the world’s nuclear giants can salvage their relationship. The Winter Olympics, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the case of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, turmoil in Ukraine and Syria, and the uncharted consequences of the shale gas boom all threaten to bring new difficulties and irritants. Things were supposed to be easier by now. Five years ago this month, the Obama administration took office vowing to repair Washington’s tattered relations with Moscow. In a...

Vladimir Putin has vowed to pursue terrorists to “total annihilation”, in his first public comments since the Volgograd suicide bombings. In his traditional New Year's Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers. “In the past year we have faced problems and serious challenges including the inhuman terror attacks in Volgograd and unprecedented disasters in the Far East,” he said. “Dear friends, we bow our heads in memory...

The essence of President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 12 was that his enchantment with state capitalism and Soviet economics is continuing. Rather than promoting higher economic growth, he wanted to go after the remaining prominent private businessmen. Russia’s most urgent economic concern is the disappearing economic growth, but only in the middle of his speech Putin arrived at the need for the “renewal of sustainable economic growth.” This time he did not blame the euro crisis, but he admitted that “the main causes of the slowdown are not external but internal.” Liberal economists usually...

HE is known as Russia's Osama bin Laden; Public Enemy No 1 for the Kremlin. Even the US has put a $5 million bounty on his head. Doku Umarov, 49, the Chechen warlord with the blackest of reputations, is assumed to be the mastermind behind a bombing campaign intended to disrupt Vladimir Putin's cherished dream of a successful Winter Olympics in Sochi. Certainly, he has set out his aims clearly enough. The Olympics, he said, were being held on "the bones of many, many dead Muslims buried on our land by the Black Sea".

An 8 ½-minute video address by self-styled Caucasus Emirate head Doku Umarov has been posted on YouTube just hours after Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov told journalists in Moscow on December 18 that “I officially state that Umarov is long dead.” Kadyrov has prematurely declared Umarov dead several times before. The video footage was dated autumn 2013 and shot outdoors. There are still some leaves on the trees visible in the background. As is the norm in such claps, Umarov is seated in front of the black jihadi banner and flanked by two younger fighters, one of whom he identifies...

Whether or not they were aware, the leaders of the Western democracies gathered in Pretoria’s stadium were inadvertently taking part in the celebration of “the people’s democracy” and not the democracy. (…) On the day of Mandela's Memorial Service in the Pretoria Stadium, the former deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party, Solly Mapaila stated in an interview that Mandela was a member of the party but it was denied at the time for “political reasons”. Documents...