Free Republic

The Republican-led House on Thursday passed a sweeping security package providing new military aid to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia, delivering a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, who opposed the measure. Eighteen Republicans crossed party lines to support the Democrat-authored legislation in a vote of 226-195. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent who caucuses with Republicans, also supported the legislation. Meanwhile, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was the lone Democratic lawmaker to vote against the bill. House GOP leadership and the vast majority of Republicans opposed the legislation aimed at bolstering Ukraine's defenses amid a surge in Russian missile...

Russian military vehicles are being painted with vivid stripes to baffle AI systems of Ukrainian-launched drones, experts say. Now the "cloaking" tactic has apparently launched a high-stakes game of hide and seek on the highways of Russian-held territory in Ukraine. Todd E. Humphreys, an aerospace and AI expert at the University of Texas at Austin, agrees the paint tactic may be more effective than many realize. "Dazzle paint pushes the vehicles 'out of distribution' -- they no longer look, to the AI classifier, like the images it was trained on," he told RFE/RL. But any specific paint job would have...

Russia's oil and gas tax revenue, which accounts for around a fifth of ​total budget income, increased by 32.4% year-on-year in May ​to 678.9 billion roubles ($9.3 billion), Finance Ministry data showed ⁠on Wednesday, thanks to a global oil price rally fuelled ​by the Middle East war. Revenue declined by 20.7% from April, when ​the budget received additional payments from profit-based tax, paid cyclically. Russia, the world's third-largest oil producer and exporter after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, ​has been one of the main beneficiaries of the rise in ​oil prices after the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran began at the...

Ukrainian drones on Wednesday attacked St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on the opening day of an annual economic conference that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to cultivate into a showcase of a modern and prosperous country. It was the second time in a month that Ukraine had struck a major Russian city before an event important to Mr. Putin, as Kyiv expands a campaign of long-range strikes aimed at inflicting economic damage on Russia and demonstrating its vulnerability to attacks. In early May, Ukrainian forces hit sites in Moscow, including a high-rise apartment building near the city center, days...

First, the bad news: The Iran War shows no signs of ending soon. Tehran on Monday said it would suspend peace talks with the U.S. in protest of Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. Now, the even worse news: The Iran War is linked to the Ukraine War in myriad disturbing ways, and the longer the former drags on, the more dangerous the latter becomes. Talk of “World War III” tends to be ludicrously overwrought—crafted to generate clicks and grab eyeballs on social media, rather than highlight geopolitical risks—but the connections between these two wars have, if anything, been underdiscussed....

Vladimir Putin has suffered a fresh wave of war humiliation amid warnings that his unaffordable conflict with Ukraine is pushing his economy to the brink of collapse. Russia's Finance Ministry and its central bank has projected the government's budget deficit widening to a dangerous level if the Kremlin continues at the current rate of defence expenditure, according to Bloomberg. The stark warning came as Putin suffered further setbacks on the frontline, where the tide of the war is increasingly turning in Ukraine's favour. And authorities in Crimea are urging citizens not to panic amid ongoing petrol shortages with pictures showing...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday said he hopes White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will come to Kyiv, Ukraine, for talks in the coming weeks. CBS News’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked the president whether he had heard from the envoys and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and whether they will ever travel to Kyiv. “Yes, we count on [them] coming to Kyiv,” Zelensky said. “I hope that they will find a possibility to come here in two weeks. But at least I’ve got such message from my negotiation group, they...

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 26, contains this invaluable insight: “As dogs return to their vomit, so fools repeat their folly. You see those who are wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for fools than for them.” Invaluable because, in connection with the Russia-Ukraine War, the passage powerfully illuminates the current debate about Ukraine’s future strategic prospects.The past few months have witnessed the dog returning to its vomit in the form of any number of efforts to once again make the case that Ukraine still has a path to total victory in its war against Russia. In...

Things are not always as they seem, and I am convinced that the drama that we witnessed at the White House on Friday is a perfect example. Right now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being endlessly ridiculed by the conservative media in the United States. One of the words that is being used to describe Zelenskyy is “stupid”, but the truth is that Zelenskyy is not stupid at all. I strongly disagree with Zelenskyy on a lot of things, but I also recognize that he is an incredibly cunning individual. He has used the war with Russia to become one...

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced a sweeping agreement with Hungary’s new government led by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, including the release of more than €16 billion in previously frozen EU funds, Hungary’s decision to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO)... The Commission president emphasized that the European Union and the Hungarian government had already established an intensive joint working structure... The European Commission president also announced that Brussels would release €10 billion from previously frozen EU funds following progress in negotiations and reforms. In addition, she revealed that €4.2 billion in cohesion funds tied to...

A drone struck a residential building in Romania’s city of Galati near the Ukrainian border, injuring two people and triggering a fire after impact, authorities said on Friday. The incident, which prompted the evacuation of dozens of residents, comes amid continued drone activity in the region linked to the war in Ukraine.

The negotiations between the United States and Iran to end their war are following President Trump’s familiar playbook for resolving a Middle East crisis: agree to a cease-fire and deal with the toughest problems later. Analysts say the approach has had mixed results in the Gaza Strip, where Mr. Trump brokered a truce last year between Israel and Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group. Plans for a so-called Phase 2 agreement — under which Hamas was to lay down its arms and Israel would allow Gaza to be rebuilt after a devastating war — have stalled. A similar approach in U.S....

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel. In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon. As a...

President Volodymyr Zelensky sent an urgent letter to US President Donald Trump warning that Ukraine is facing a worsening shortage of air defense systems, particularly anti-ballistic missile capabilities, according to a report on Wednesday, May 27. According to the Kyiv Independent, the letter warns that Ukraine’s current stockpile of Patriot interceptors and other Western-provided air defense systems may not be sufficient to withstand escalating Russian missile attacks.

"Russia is considering limiting exports of diesel and jet fuel," Bloomberg and other sources reported Tuesday, "as refinery run rates fall to multi-year lows amid Ukraine’s escalating attacks." An Interfax source claimed that the decision to ban exports is at "an advanced stage," but no date has been set. If it comes to pass, that would be bad for diesel prices and inflation right here at home, but worse for Moscow's finances. Just the fact that the Kremlin is considering an export ban is more evidence that Kyiv's drone campaign is increasingly effective — against Russia's energy production at home,...

It has been more than four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And although polls show that a majority of Americans support Ukraine, military and financial assistance to bolster its defensive and offensive capabilities have fallen dramatically. This is in no small part due to President Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s open antipathy toward President Volodymyr Zelensky, which has led to the blatant slow walking of implementing support already appropriated by Congress. As co-founder of a humanitarian organization, I have traveled frequently to Ukraine and seen the devastation caused by Russia’s relentless attacks on non-combatant civilians, including children....

Russia tells foreign nationals, including diplomatic missions and staff, to leave Kyiv ASAP

Today's video investigates the absurdities of the policies, and how they lead to inefficiencies both domestic and international. We then try to understand why autocratic governments nonetheless offer subsidies despite knowing all of their drawbacks. Turkmenistan prior to 2019? Free natural gas for everyone. Great. But it gave rise to the saying, "A Turkman does not turn off his stove because then he will have to pay for matches." Hence why I had to add the prior to 2019 qualifier there because that policy sure as heck was not sustainable.

Ukraine Just LOCKED The Door — 85,000 Russian Troops Are Now TRAPPED Forever Ukraine has sealed off a critical escape route, leaving 85,000 Russian troops with nowhere to go. In this video, we break down exactly how Ukrainian forces executed this strategic move, what it means for the front lines, and whether Putin's army can survive what's coming next. 🗺️ What We Cover: ✅ How Ukraine closed the last exit for Russian forces ✅ The military significance of trapping 85,000 troops ✅ Russia's desperate options — and why none of them work ✅ What happens next on the eastern front...

In 2020, just 246 people tried to sneak into Poland from Belarus through the marshy wetlands on the border, according to the Polish government’s records. There was a pandemic on, after all. But over the following year, almost 40,000 migrants from Syria, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, India and other countries crossed or attempted to cross this frontier. Those migrants didn’t end up in Belarus by accident. Some were carrying Russian visas or entry stamps. Russia and its ally — some would say lackey — Belarus were, in effect, importing migrants, delivering them to the Polish-Belarusian border and telling them to head...