Free Republic

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

FULL TITLE: Russian reinforcements head for Syria: Warships laden with tanks, military trucks and armoured patrol boats sail towards the Middle East as the world awaits Putin's response to airstrikes Project 117 Alligator-class landing ship was spotted at Bosphorus, Turkey en-route to Syria on Sunday The Russian vessel was laden with tanks, ambulances and IED radar after Friday's US-led Syrian air strikes A RoRo Alexandr Tkachenko was also seen carrying high-speed patrol boats, temporary bridge and trucks US, UK and French forces backed strikes that obliterated three targets in response to chemical weapon attack Vladimir Putin warned there would be...

Actions by the United States and its allies in Syria would entail consequences for which they would have to bear responsibility, Russia's ambassador in Washington Anatoly Antonov said in a statement....... Statement by the Ambassador of Russia to the USA Anatoly Antonov on the strikes in Syria The worst apprehensions have come true. Our warnings have been left unheard. A pre-designated scenario is being implemented. Again, we are being threatened. We warned that such actions will not be left without consequences. All responsibility for them rests with Washington, London and Paris. Insulting the President of Russia is unacceptable and inadmissible....

Allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign were “invented” by Trump's opponents, Vladimir Putin said Thursday while praising the president's “serious achievements” in office. “All of this has been invented, made up by people who are in opposition to President Trump with a view to shedding a negative light on what [he] is doing,” the Russian leader said at his annual televised news conference, calling the allegations “very bizarre.” Those behind the claims are trying to “impede” Trump’s agenda and are damaging the U.S. political system by failing to respect voters who chose the president, he added.

World News | Thu Jun 15, 2017 | 11:48am EDT Putin quips he's ready to grant asylum to ex-FBI chief Comey By Dmitry Solovyov and Vladimir Soldatkin | MOSCOW Russian President Vladimir Putin joked on Thursday that if former FBI director James Comey suffers persecution because of his falling-out with U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia is ready to grant him asylum. The offer, made with Putin's trademark sardonic humor, came as the Russian president poured scorn on Comey for his role in a row in Washington over alleged Russian meddling in last year's U.S. presidential election. At a congressional hearing...

Well, that's Strange... Here’s what we know. In the photo below, Chuck Schumer appears with an unidentified foreign personage of some sort. They’re eating donuts at a Kirspy Kreme. We assume everything is on the up and up, because Schumer is obviously a person of the highest moral character, but we’d still like to know who his companion is. He looks kind of familiar, but we just can’t seem to place the face.

Vladimir Putin, Leader of the Free World By David P. Goldman on November 18, 2015 in AT Top Writers, David P. Goldman, Spengler If Mikhail Bulgakov had come back to life and written a Levantine sequel to The Master and Margarita, he could not have devised a scenario more lurid than what we now observe in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now the leader of the Free World against Islamist terrorism, directing the efforts of France and Germany and setting terms for American involvement. Reeling from last week’s massacre in Paris, France lacks both the backbone and the brute...

“No need to worry, everything is all right” – that was the message from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, following speculation that the president was ill or even dead. Mr Putin has not been seen in public since March 5, and has reportedly cancelled a string of meetings since then. The president was due to meet his Kazakh counterpart on 5 March, but a source told Reuters the meeting was cancelled because Putin had fallen ill. Photos have since been released in an attempt to dispel fears, but those photos appear to have been taken before March 5. On...

A Syrian businessman described as the "middleman" for oil deals between ISIS and Bashar al-Assad's regime will be targeted for European Union sanctions on Saturday. The listing of George Haswani, the owner of HESCO engineering company, sheds more light on financial links between Syria's regime and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or Isil or Islamic State or Daiesh).

Various people's takes on this one are starting to converge to the same picture... In pictures... Want to understand what’s happening in the Ukraine? Try Google searches on “Ukraine Soros” and/or “Ukraine Monsanto”... People with brains and talent in Ukraine know that Russia's star is rising, and that ours is falling. Only losers and Soros rent-a-rioters are on the wrong side of that one. "Pussy Riot"?? http://www.tomatobubble.com/pussyriot.html http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/08/the-pussy-riot-flap/ You open the history book under 'G' for "groupies", and you go through the list of guys who've ever inspired groupie or fan phenomena, and you can at least understand most of...

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...

'They killed with apparent impunity, effortlessly dodging capture by the world’s deadliest special forces. Nothing, it seemed, could stop Al Qaeda’s two top Iraqi terrorists as they orchestrated a campaign of high-profile kidnappings, car bombings and executions in Baghdad and beyond. At the height of their reign, one of them, Maher Ahmed Mahmoud az-Zubeidi, better known by his alias Abu Rami, was believed to have been responsible for the murders of 200 people each month. Yet perhaps even more ferocious was his charismatic co-leader, Abu Uthman, whose exploits in two battles in Fallujah earned him the nickname Abu Nimr –...

Snip "Putin's Army" is a group on a Russian social networking -- vkontakte.ru/armiaputina -- that invites girls to "tear their clothes off" in support of the former president. Participants will also be entered in an iPad 2 raffle. Snip

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The price tag on a bride in Russia's Ingushetia province has been tripled by the regional government, in a sign the Muslim North Caucasus region is slipping out of Kremlin control as sharia law eclipses Russian. Against the backdrop of a bubbling Islamist insurgency, the revival of Islam in the North Caucasus following the break-up of the Soviet Union almost 20 years ago has brought sharia law to the region, revered by both rebels and ordinary citizens alike. The issue of the 'kalym', a price paid by a groom to the family of the woman he chooses...

Macho Putin in yet ANOTHER display of masculinity as he releases 'Let's learn judo with Vladimir' DVD By Mail Foreign Service Last updated at 5:51 PM on 07th October 2008 First we saw him shirtless while fishing. Then he was pictured at the wheel of a massive racing truck and shooting a tiger in the Siberian forest with a tranquiliser. He has also appeared operating a train, sailing on a submarine and co-piloting a fighter jet. Now Vladimir Putin - the world's most manly leader - has released yet another display of his own masculinity: a DVD entitled 'Let's learn...

LONDON: As many as 60 Russian spies are operating in Britain, virtually unchallenged by a domestic intelligence service preoccupied by the threat from Islamic extremism, a lawmaker told a debate Wednesday on relations between Moscow and London.Chris Bryant, a legislator with Tony Blair's governing Labour party who convened and led the session, said Russian authorities had shown a "casual disregard" for the deaths of journalists critical of the Kremlin.Outside analysts said Bryant's figure seemed high, though British intelligence officials have expressed concern about espionage.Lawmakers held the debate at the House of Commons ancillary chamber Westminster Hall following the poisoning death...

WASHINGTON, October 4 (Itar-Tass) – As for to day Russia “has no Iegal obstacles to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran,” Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of the Russian Rosatom nuclear agency told reporters on Tuesday. “We normally work in the framework of international law which is international agreements signed by Russia and resolutions of the UN Security Council,” Spassky said noting that today there are no such resolutions limiting nuclear fuel deliveries to Iran. However if the United States adopts a law limiting partnership relations with countries cooperating with Iran and if this law affects relations between the two countries in...

If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon....

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on the most massive military buildups in history. Part of President Reagan's strategy for winning was to entice the Soviets into a competition it could never even hope to win. A communist economy by its very nature is ill-equipped to compete with a free-market, capitalist system whether it's foreign trade or weapons technology. And so, slowly the Soviet economy became a basket case due to the communists desire to exceed America in an enormously expensive arms race. After the Cold War, with the Soviet threat gone and with...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An unknown number of people were killed in an explosion at a Moscow market, Interfax news agency reported on Monday, quoting an eyewitness.