Free Republic

On 9 February 2017, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a member of the Expedition 50 crew, captured a winter landscape image from the International Space Station. It was of the Dnipro River. The photograph showed a great, coursing white snake that reminded Pesquet of a Japanese ‘Hokusai painting’. The white was ice and it explains why Russian forces on the Dnipro right bank now face a ‘difficult situation’, as described by General Sergei Surovikin, the recently appointed operational commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. In winter the Dnipro freezes over, usually after a 20-day spell of sub-zero temperatures. A...

Musk understands what many commentators don’t: The war will end in a negotiated settlement or it will escalate, possibly into nuclear war.As if to burnish his reputation as a super-villain in the eyes of the corporate press, Elon Musk this week floated an idea on Twitter for a possible resolution of the Russo-Ukrainian war. For his trouble, he was swiftly accused of being a pro-Putin stooge by guardians of the Official Narrative. His suggested peace plan was dismissed out of hand as “Russia-friendly” and, as The Washington Post’s Olivier Knox put it, “designed to lock in Russian territorial gains.”But Musk’s...