Free Republic

The Kremlin on Friday confirmed a report that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will give his long-delayed 2022 annual address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, 2023, a date chosen to coincide with the anniversary of his attack on Ukraine. The address is reportedly to be followed up with a “large-scale concert and rally event at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium” the next day.

Germany is now also debating to reinstitute the military draft. I warned from the outset that Zelensky was nothing more than an actor and he was handed the role of a lifetime to pretend to be the head of state of Ukraine and everything he said to get elected was an outright lie. There is absolutely NOTHING Zelensky says which has EVER been the truth – that is what he was paid to do and instructed by the West’s Neocons who cannot sleep at night as long as China and Russia still exist. The Neocons are driving this agenda and...

There are three recent articles I want to make sure you have read because they reveal the delusion that continues to afflict U.S. military leaders, pundits and the establishment media. First up is US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who provided some surprising candor during a speech in late January to a Swedish defense conference but failed to comprehend what he was saying: The heavy casualties and massive ammunition consumption seen during the war in Ukraine has top NATO commanders worried. . . . “The scale of this war is out of proportion with all of...

On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians. Officials from the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were located in the vicinity at the time and kept a record of the shelling as it took place.

...consciously or unconsciously, Zelenskiy has already learned much of what this history has to offer, whereas Vladimir Putin has demonstrably not. 1. leave strategy to your most talented generals. This is a warning Joseph Stalin did not heed. At the start of 1942, and despite having no military training, he ordered a major offensive against the German army around Kharkiv in Ukraine. More than 250,000 Red Army soldiers were lost as a result of the disastrous Kharkov operation. It was a defeat that was all the more humiliating because the Red Army had outnumbered the Germans on the battlefield. Putin,...

... For too long Washington has refused to think strategically about some of the major foreign policy issues of our time. In the rare instance where Washington’s policymakers do think strategically, the strategies they concoct seem less like realistic attempts at applying state power and more like they were conceived over a game of Risk while under the heavy influence of alcohol. Such is the case with the current American preoccupation in Ukraine. The Russians have invaded Ukraine. They’ve committed their entire society to the war. In the words of popular geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan, this is “Russia’s last war.”...

Ukraine is prepared to use British long-range missiles to hit Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, in a potential major escalation of western involvement in the war. Rishi Sunak promised to send Ukraine more military aid following a visit by President Zelensky to Britain this week. Discussions are now taking place over whether this should include Harpoon anti-ship missiles or air-to-surface Storm Shadows. Ukrainian defence sources confirmed to The Times that Kyiv would be prepared to use the missiles to strike Crimea following a warning from Zelensky that longer-range weapons from western allies would strike “deep in the...