Free Republic

The Russian military is quickly running out of artillery and rocket ammunition, Pentagon officials said Monday, and the Russian army can only sustain its current rate of attack in Ukraine until early next year. A senior U.S. defense official told reporters on a conference call that Moscow is increasingly turning to Iran and North Korea to replenish its “rapidly dwindling” stockpiles of rocket and artillery rounds,...

“Early retirement” is a strange way to describe a 44-year-old’s acceptance of a new government role, but for Mikk Marran, Estonia’s spymaster, it feels a lot like that. As of next month he will no longer helm Välisluureamet, the Baltic state’s foreign intelligence service, which, long before Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine, was at the forefront of assessing the threats and capabilities of a resurgent and revanchist Russia.(snip) According to one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer, “Estonia punches far above its weight on Russian affairs. The respect for Marran and his service in the U.S. intelligence community is quite...