Free Republic

Russia has been sharing intelligence with Iran on the location of US forces in the Middle East in an attempt to help Tehran fight back, according to a new report. The Kremlin has passed on the locations of American warships, aircrafts and other military assets ever since “Operation Epic Fury” kicked off a week ago, three sources told the Washington Post Friday. “It does seem like it’s a pretty comprehensive effort,” one official familiar with the intel told the outlet.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said Thursday that Republicans need to find an alternative to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election, saying the party needs "a candidate who can actually win." "I think President Trump’s time has passed him by," Cornyn said when asked about the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which is still taking shape. "I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base."

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...

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....

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...

"This is the proportional response that Russia has the right to," the Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman stressedMOSCOW, February 24. /TASS/. A nuclear strike on targets in Ukraine, as well as in France and the United Kingdom, would be considered lawful and justified in the event that London and Paris provide Kiev with nuclear capabilities, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Max, commenting on Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service’s (SVR) reports about such plans by the two European countries. According to Medvedev, this information "radically changes the situation." "This is a direct transfer of nuclear weapons to a...

KYIV, Ukraine, and MOSCOW — When the Kremlin launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the assumption in Moscow, and much of the West, was that Russian forces would take the country in a matter of days. Instead, what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" has become the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and has lasted longer than the Soviet army's fight against Nazi Germany. Russia's war on Ukraine is a grinding war of attrition. Ukraine has managed to hold a much larger army to minimal gains while adjusting to a life under constant...

Ukraine has regained control of 400 square kilometres of territory, including eight settlements, along a section of the southern frontline since the end of January, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has said. Syrskyi's statement on Monday did not make clear how much of the newly secured territory had previously been under Russian control and how much lay in "grey zone" areas not firmly held by either side. The rare battlefield gains in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region stand in contrast to the broader trend of slow and costly Russian advances across the frontlines over the past two and a half years, as the...

Ukraine is outmatched by Russian forces and requires significantly more infantry and weapons if it hopes to win the war, according to military intelligence and independent battlefield monitors. Although Moscow is paying an extraordinary price for comparatively minimal gains, western officials believe the country can sustain at least another year of war at the current rate of attrition. On Tuesday it will be four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After months of incremental advances, it appears to be on the verge of capturing a series of strategic locations in Ukraine’s so-called “fortress belt” and is expanding...

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone — the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbor is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland. After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost....

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that the UK and its allies should deploy non-combat troops to Ukraine right now, to "flip a switch" in Russian President Vladimir Putin's head. Speaking exclusively to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg alongside the former head of the military, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, Johnson said troops should be sent to peaceful regions in non-fighting roles. He said: "If we can have a plan for boots on the ground after the war, after Putin has condescended to have a ceasefire, then why not do it now?" The UK government is currently working with its allies to...

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022. The phone call William Burns had travelled halfway around the world to speak with Vladimir Putin, but in the end he had...