Free Republic

Today, the most important developments come from the Huliaipole direction. Here, north of the main stronghold, Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian positions and are expanding their advance. Russian defenses began to fall apart more quickly than anticipated, allowing even deeper penetration by Ukrainian forces. Recently, the Ukrainian command reported restoring control over more than 400 square kilometers through counterattacks, while daily combat intensity in the direction has reached roughly fifty engagements per day. As Ukrainian forces regain control over key terrain, they improve their ability to observe Russian movement, making it harder for Russian forces to reposition without being...

Ukraine is offering to share its hard-won battlefield lessons on Iranian drones with allies now confronting the same threat it has for years, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning that no country can assume it’s fully protected from the kind of drone barrages Russia unleashes nightly. “Everyone can now see that Ukraine’s experience in defense is, in many respects, irreplaceable,” Zelensky said in a post to X Monday urging deeper cooperation with partners. “We are ready to share this experience and help those nations that helped Ukraine this winter and throughout this war. We are ready to work on developing...

Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin yielded no ceasefire, but it revealed the contours of a possible peace—where diplomacy, exhaustion, and hard limits define the battlefield’s end. At the August 15 Alaska summit, Vladimir Putin performed as expected. He desperately wants an end to Western sanctions, détente with the U.S., and assurances that the U.S. will not impose a disastrous anti-Russian secondary boycott—and, apparently, some additional Ukrainian territory. Consequently, Putin, in his media synopsis, talked more about restored friendship with a “neighborly” United States under Trump. He scarcely mentioned Ukraine directly—other than to imply to Westerners that he seeks not merely...

A Ukraine-Russia ceasefire looms, with Trump pushing deals, Zelenskyy negotiating leverage, and Putin weighing risks—while the West quietly concedes it never had a real plan to win. Aside from the rhetoric, there is a growing consensus among Western diplomats, military analysts, military officers, heads of state, and even much of the media about how to end the endless Ukrainian war. A proposed peace will see a DMZ established somewhere along an adjusted 1,200-mile Ukraine-Russia border. Tough negotiations will adjudicate how far east toward its original borders Russian forces will be leveraged to backstep. Publicly in the U.S. and covertly in...

Trump pressured NATO, armed Ukraine, and imposed tough policies on Russia, while Europe postures without action—leaving real deterrence to the U.S. Fable One: Donald Trump Is Appeasing Russia?Who wiped out the Wagner group in Syria? Who sold offensive weapons to Ukraine first? Who warned Germany not to become dependent on the Russian Nord Stream II deal? Who withdrew from an unfair missile deal with the Russians? Who cajoled and berated NATO members to meet their military investment promises made following the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? In contrast, who originally conceived a Russian “reset” in 2009? Who publicly virtue-signaled pushing the...

Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 because he saw weakness in the West, but now both he and the world want an end to the war—Trump may be the only one willing to cut an imperfect but necessary deal. To find an impossible peace between Ukraine and Russia we must understand the recent history of the war and the European and American roles in it. So, Americans should revisit some fundamental realities and questions from which to remember before going forward: Why Did Putin Invade Ukraine in 2022?Putin did start the war. Trump’s trolling aside, he knows that because he correctly...

During his trip to Europe last week, Vice President JD Vance said to European leaders at the Munich Security Conference, “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.” In the face of mounting inflation and rampant illegal immigration, Europe’s leaders must listen to their people and not take a “hard left,” plunging the country into a Joe Biden-level, continentwide...

Why does the Biden-Harris administration deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it. After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya. The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO...

Russia has warned that the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran could result in the very outcome they were seeking to prevent, by spurring both Iran and its Arab neighbours to seek to acquire nuclear weapons. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the logical consequence would be that “forces will emerge in Iran … in favour of doing exactly what the Americans want to avoid acquiring a nuclear bomb. Because the US doesn’t attack those who have nuclear bombs”. Lavrov told a press conference that Arab countries could also join the race to build a bomb. The...

March 1 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that the changes in Iran ‌brought about by U.S. and Israeli strikes ‌should be "used properly" to benefit the country's people who had ​withstood violence from their authorities. Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said Iran's authorities had killed "tens of thousands of people in the last couple of ‌months alone," referring ⁠to a crackdown on protests. Iran, he said, had "predetermined the way it is treated" ⁠by supplying attack drones to Russia in Moscow's four-year-old conflict in Ukraine and had also "fomented wars ​in the ​region." "It...

As events in the Middle East and the Gulf region unfold “extremely rapidly,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine knows “all too well” what such escalation means, pointing to Iran’s role in supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. “Although Ukrainians never threatened Iran, the Iranian regime chose to become Putin’s accomplice,” Zelensky said in a statement on Saturday. He said Iran supplied Russia not only with Shahed drones but also with technologies to produce them, as well as other weapons. According to Zelensky, Russia has used more than 57,000 Shahed-type attack drones during the full-scale war, targeting Ukrainian civilians, cities and...

Former Pentagon adviser Douglas Macgregor argues the West misread Russia’s strength and that large-scale arms supplies failed to shift the Ukraine conflict. The West is still unwilling to abandon its course of prolonging the conflict in Ukraine, clinging to the belief that sustained pressure will eventually weaken Russia. That assessment was voiced by former Pentagon adviser Douglas Macgregor in an interview with the Swiss publication Die Weltwoche. According to Macgregor, political circles in several European countries remain convinced that Russia is fragile and nearing collapse. He argued that such assumptions bear little resemblance to reality and reflect a profound misreading...

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is pressing Kyiv to agree to painful territorial concessions as the price for peace. In a draft peace agreement first reported by Axios in November, the administration proposed that the entire regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk be recognized as de facto Russian territory and that Russia retain control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia its forces now occupy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing back, refusing to do anything that would violate his country’s territorial integrity. Yet the realities of the battlefield are not on his side....

On Tuesday night, President Trump made his case for attacking Iran. #Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves if an attack on Iran is prudent or desirable.#In his address, Trump argued that Iran was in the process of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to hit the United States. This assertion is farcical and risible. Iran simply has no ability to hit the United States, and even if it did, the doctrine of classical deterrence would come into play. The United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear-armed ICBMs targeted at each other for decades yet never engaged in direct conflict....

"Cuban border guards did what they had to do in this situation," Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters on Thursday morning, according to the Russian state news outlet RIA Novosti. In a statement on Wednesday night, the interior ministry said the 10 people aboard the speedboat were "Cuban residents of the United States," who were allegedly armed with weapons and "intended to carry out an infiltration for terrorist purposes." Those on board the U.S-registered speedboat, which had been reported stolen in Florida, allegedly opened fire on Cuban border guard troops as they approached the boat...

Hungary will deploy soldiers and equipment to protect key energy infrastructure amid what Prime Minister Viktor Orban described as a potential Ukrainian threat, he said on Feb. 25, escalating tensions tied to disrupted Russian oil transit....

Russia says it has handed over the remains of 1,000 soldiers to Ukraine and has received the bodies of 35 Russian soldiers in return. Vladimir Medinsky, a top aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin, announced the exchange of bodies in a short announcement on Telegram. He gave no details, but included an image showing bodies being unloaded from a truck. Hours later, Ukraine said it had received 1,000 bodies which, "according to prior information from the Russian side, may belong to Ukrainian defenders".

India will likely continue buying Russian oil as the U.S. Supreme Court's verdict outlawing President Donald Trump's import tariffs has constrained his trade policy options, analysts said. "I do expect that India will maintain a healthy relationship with Russia, including on energy," Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft told CNBC's Inside India. He added that India could reduce its Russian oil purchases but is unlikely to stop completely. According to energy data provider Kpler, India has imported 1.16 million barrel per day (mbd) of Russian oil so far in February, lower...

hirty-five years ago, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama made a name for himself by advancing the proposition that the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union promised the ascendency and universalization of so-called Western liberal democracy. As a Marxist-Hegelian who saw the progression of history as an evolutionary process with a natural and predetermined conclusion, Fukuyama envisioned Western-styled liberalism as both “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government.” Expecting all human struggles to barrel toward a state of imminent equilibrium and future peace, Fukuyama stated out loud what many...

Russia accused Ukraine on Tuesday of trying to obtain a nuclear weapon with help from Britain and France, an allegation Kyiv called an absurd lie. A French foreign ministry spokesperson said the allegation was "blatant disinformation". A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: "There's no truth to this." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has previously criticised Kyiv's decision to give up its former Soviet nuclear arsenal in the 1990s without obtaining proper, binding security guarantees. But Kyiv has said it does not seek to re-acquire nuclear weapons, and respects all international treaties. NUCLEAR THREATSIn a statement published on the...