Free Republic

Not long after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a year ago this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky found himself in a safe room beneath Kyiv’s government complex with the voice of the Belarusian president booming over the phone. Alexander Lukashenko, one of the Kremlin’s key allies, was inviting a delegation of officials to Minsk to negotiate an end to the war that Russia had launched just three days earlier, according to Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, who was in the room for the call. Zelensky was incensed at the invitation to another negotiation — recalling...

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia's mercenary group Wagner, accused unspecified officials of deliberately denying his fighters sufficient ammunition as part of an ongoing rivalry between himself and parts of the Russian elite. A onetime catering entrepreneur who once shunned the public spotlight, Prigozhin has assumed an ever more public role in Russian politics since the start of the war in Ukraine a year ago, with his Wagner Group spearheading Russia's months-long battle for the town of Bakhmut in Ukraine's Donetsk region. In a seven-minute long audio message published on Monday by his press service, an apparently angry and emotional...

As Russia steps up its offensive in eastern Ukraine, weeks of failed attacks on a Ukrainian stronghold have left two Russian brigades in tatters, raised questions about Moscow’s military tactics and renewed doubts about its ability to maintain sustained, large-scale ground assaults. The fighting has also come at a cost for Ukraine, which is expending vast amounts of ammunition to repel Russia’s growing numbers of ground troops, often supported by heavy armor, artillery and close air support. That has added urgency to Ukraine’s pleas for more ammunition, while Western allies this week expressed increasing concern about their ability to meet...

“I’m terrified, I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly,” the mother of accused leaker Reality Sara Winner told CBS News after her daughter’s arrest under the Espionage Act for stealing Top Secret documents and passing them along to a media outlet. Billie-Jean Davis says her daughter is afraid that law enforcement will “make her disappear,” but then at the same time claims that the US government wants to make an example of Winner. “That’s not fair,” she tells CBS:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) The mother and stepfather of 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor accused of leaking government secrets, are...