Free Republic

My sources have already confirmed to me that one of the two convicted persons is Konstantin Nikitenko, a shooter on an armored car carrier, and the other is a machine gun shooter known as "Frost".Information on the fate of the two Ukrainian prisoners seems to be fairly certain, all the more so as their detention in the Elenovka detention center in Donetsk has been confirmed by several sources.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stormed off and headed home early after being snubbed by other diplomats at the G20 summit — who refused to take a group photo with him over his nation’s invasion of Ukraine. Foreign ministers who gathered in Bali, Indonesia, this week, did not pose for a traditional “family”-style group photo, after several of them reportedly refused to be pictured with Vladimir Putin’s chief envoy. The Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken led the photo-op boycott.

Consider the Buryats, one of Siberia’s largest Indigenous groups. Closely related to Mongolians, they were subjugated, annexed, and subsequently colonized by Russia in the 1600s. Russian independent news outlets Mediazona and iStories found that by mid-May, Buryatia had the second-highest number of soldiers killed in Ukraine since the start of the invasion—just after Dagestan, another conquest of the Russian Empire. By May 18, Buryatia had lost 117 soldiers (the actual number is likely higher), whereas the city of Moscow, with a population around 15 times Buryatia’s, lost only three. Relative to the population, Buryatia’s rate of battle deaths was the...

Shocking footage has emerged of the moment a Russian soldier attempted to destroy a Ukrainian missile launcher from close range with dramatic and potentially lethal consequences. The clip, shared on a pro-Russian channel on social media and messaging app Telegram, shows one of Putin's fighters taking aim at an abandoned Ukrainian S-300 missile launcher sitting mere yards away. After taking a few moments to compose himself, the soldier squeezes the trigger of his PKM machine gun, presumably expecting to damage the hardware or perhaps set off a minor explosion to render it inoperable. A split second later the missile launcher...