Free Republic

A planned exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war failed to take place on Saturday, with Moscow accusing Kyiv of postponing the swap at the last minute, something Ukrainian officials dismissed as “dirty games” from the Kremlin. Russia said Ukraine unexpectedly postponed a transfer involving prisoners of war and the bodies of dead soldiers, leaving more than 1,200 frozen Ukrainian bodies waiting in refrigerated trucks at an exchange point with no one to collect them. Ukraine rejected Russia’s account of the events, saying that the two sides had agreed to exchange seriously wounded and young troops on Saturday but...

A huge blaze has erupted at an oil refinery in a Russian town that was hit by Ukrainian drones earlier this year. Footage shows a fire raging at the industrial site in Kstovo, around 500 miles from the front lines in eastern Ukraine. A thick column of black smoke poured from the plant, reportedly the Lukoil oil refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

Last night, explosions and secondary detonation were reported at the facility, evidently used militarily. A Ukrainian drone attack on Bryansk airport overnight on 5–6 June destroyed a Russian Mi-8 helicopter and damaged a Mi-35, according to Russian news Telegram channel Astra. There are signs of the long-lasting military use of the civilian facility, Militarnyi notes.

Since the missile attack, all 8 Tu-95s which were airborne and 1 of the Tu-160s landed at Engels-2 Airbase. The whereabouts of the other 3 Tu-160s is currently unknown. A few hours ago, 7 Tu-95s departed from Engels-2, and are redeploying to Ukrainka Airbase in Amur Oblast. The other Tu-95 and the Tu-160 have likely been equipped or are in the process of being equipped with Kh-101 cruise missiles, from the first IL-76MD which landed there 12 hours ago. This also means that this is one of the rare instances where there are no strategic bombers stationed at Olenya Airbase...

After Ukraine launched a huge drone strike on Russian airbases last weekend, Putin vowed retaliation. In a phone call with President Trump, Vladmir Putin was reportedly insistent that Russia must respond to Ukraine’s attack, which damaged over 40 aircraft. Now, we have reports that that retaliation may be underway. Russia has launched a massive overnight drone and ballistic missile strike on Ukraine, targeting Kiev and several other major cities. Alleged footage of the strike is going viral online: VIDEOS AT LINK..................... The Kyiv Independent said: Russia barraged Ukraine with missiles and drones throughout the night, threatening every region in the...

“ The strike on Russian airfields was a tactical victory for Ukraine, but a strategic failure - at least in the eyes of the closest circle of the American leader Donald Trump. The rhetoric has changed dramatically. Kiev is no longer an ally, but a potential threat to global security. One of those who is sure that Kiev screwed up and at the same time exposed not only itself, is retired US Air Force General Blaine Holt. On the air of the Newsmax TV channel, he stressed that the attack of Ukrainian drones on airfields in Russia had affected a...

The comments, in an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, were Trump’s clearest indication to date that he was unsure he would be able to quell Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Ukraine and Russia may need to keep fighting, President Donald Trump said Thursday, comparing the warring nations to squabbling children in what appeared to be a signal that the U.S. leader was losing interest in brokering peace in a conflict he once promised to end in a day. The comments, in an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, were Trump’s clearest indication to date that...

President Trump said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are similar to children fighting on a playground and that more time may be needed before “pulling them apart.” “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled,” Trump told reporters while hosting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office. “Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart. And I gave that analogy to Putin...

According to the media report, the US president expressed sincere gratitudeBEIJING, June 5. /TASS/. Chinese President Xi Jinping has invited US leader Donald Trump to visit China, China Central Television reports. According to the broadcaster, in a phone call with Trump, Xi said he would welcome his visit to China, and the US president expressed sincere gratitude. The call was initiated by the White House.

PRYLUKY, Ukraine (AP) – At least five people, including a 1-year-old child, his mother and grandmother, were killed Thursday in a nighttime Russian drone attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Pryluky, officials said. Six drones hit a residential area in the city shortly before dawn, injuring nine others, according to authorities. The child killed was the grandson of the local fire chief, Ukraine´s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said. The fire chief, identified by local officials as 50-year-old Oleksandr Lebid, “arrived to respond to the aftermath right at his own home,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on...

In May, an American investor tried to sell top German economic officials on an audacious plan to buy a Russian undersea pipeline. Despite years of international friction over the pipeline, he proposed to eventually activate it and deliver natural gas to Germany. The investor, Stephen P. Lynch, had already made the pitch to the Trump administration, which he was betting would want U.S. control over a pivotal piece of energy infrastructure. Now the Germans wanted to hear for themselves about Mr. Lynch’s proposal to lead a takeover of the much-criticized pipeline on the floor of the Baltic Sea, called Nord...

Freedom requires a price to be paid by every generation 1. While most of America remains blissfully uniformed by our establishment press, the world's two greatest superpowers are being manipulated by Dark Forces inside and outside our government, into a major military confrontation that no country wants, and no sane person would ever want. 2. I have no role in the Trump Administration, but over a long career in the active uniformed military, specifically military intelligence, I have made it a point to cultivate many sources of information around the world. From what I can piece together, I want to...

Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) has gained access to sensitive data of Russia's strategic aircraft manufacturer Tupolev, a source in HUR told the Kyiv Independent on June 4... ...According to the source, HUR's cyber corps accessed over 4.4 gigabytes (GB) of internal data, including official correspondence, personnel files, home addresses, resumes, purchase records, and closed meeting minutes. "The significance of the data obtained cannot be overestimated," the source said. "Now, in fact, there is nothing secret left in Tupolev's activities for Ukrainian intelligence.

~Here's a cheery headline from the Russian press: Markov: an attack on Russia's strategic aviation is grounds for the use of nuclear weapons. That would be Sergey Markov, former advisor to Tsar Vlad, who admittedly is somewhat partial to nuke-rattling: in the early stages of the Ukraine war, he threatened to nuke the UK, for what reason I forget - the exciting new Islamic blasphemy laws? the paedo rape gangs? This time, however, Mr Markov was responding to the weekend's Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia. By "deep", I mean Siberia. Which supposedly took out forty of Putin's 120 strategic...

I just finished speaking, by telephone, with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and 15 minutes. We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.

A transgender journalist who joined the Ukrainian military has been sentenced to 20 years in a harsh Russian penal colony. The Supreme Court in Russia convicted in absentia 47 year old US citizen Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a former Los Angeles-based journalist who enlisted as a military medic in Ukraine's Armed Forces in 2022.

Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on. The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million. Officials cautioned that casualty figures were difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war...

Russian authorities formally classified recent bombings targeting railway infrastructure in the Bryansk and Kursk regions as acts of terrorism on Tuesday, following deadly explosions between May 31 and June 1. "The Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia has classified the bombings of sections of the railway and bridge structure in the Bryansk and Kursk regions... as terrorist acts," Investigative Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko told reporters. "It is obvious that the terrorists, acting on the instructions of the Kiev regime, planned everything with maximum precision so that hundreds of civilians would be hit," Petrenko emphasized. According to investigators,...

Russian forces have continued to advance in the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, bringing the regional capital within range of their drones and artillery, according to Ukrainian officials and analysts. A spokesman for the Ukrainian military in the area, Ivan Shevtsov, said that in addition to trying to advance towards Sumy city, Russian forces were constantly shelling the area and more evacuations of civilians were taking place. “At the moment, the territory that the enemy has already occupied is about 15 kilometers along the front line and about 6-7 kilometers deep,” Shevtsov said. He added that the Russians were trying...

YIV, Ukraine (AP) – A Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Tuesday, in which at least three people were killed and many others injured, was described by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “brutal.” According to authorities, a barrage of multiple rockets struck apartment buildings and a medical facility in the center of the northeastern city a day after direct peace talks made no progress on ending the 3-year war. Zelenskyy said one of the rockets fired at Sumy pierced the wall of an apartment building but failed to detonate.