Free Republic

Russia's natural gas giant Gazprom may slash staff numbers as it faces dwindling revenues amid sanctions imposed following President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. -snip- In December, Elena Ilyukhina, a deputy chair of Gazprom's management committee, sent a proposal to CEO Alexey Miller to reduce staff from 4,100 to 2,500 at the firms' central office and St. Petersburg branch, according to the 47news telegram channel. On Monday, the outlet posted an image of the document, in which Ilyukhina described the challenges Gazprom faced. In a call for "cost optimization at all levels of management," she said the company needed to...

US President-elect Donald Trump said that a meeting was being set up between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. "He wants to meet, and we are setting it up," Trump said in remarks before a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals have an artful knack for keeping the Russian military bear off-balance. On Sunday, they renewed their offensive in the Russian Kursk Oblast, once again catching the Russian high command, Kremlin, and many pundits by surprise. Reports of a demoralized Ukrainian army fighting to retain terrain captured during the August Kursk offensive — of which at least 40 percent has been lost — have circulated among western media and Russian milbloggers since November. So too reports that Ukraine’s 155th Mechanized Brigade — trained and equipped by France — was under-resourced in “first person view...