Free Republic

Kaja Kallas said that Belgium has legitimate concerns about the risks, but the other member-states have said that they are willing to share those risksBRUSSELS, December 1. /TASS/. The European Commission intends to make the decision on the expropriation of Russian assets at the European Council’s meeting on December 18-19, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas told reporters. "We are not going to leave the Council in December without the result for the financing of Ukraine," Kallas said. "Belgium has legitimate concerns about the risks, but the other member-states have said that they...

Putin gambled on Western hesitation, and now a war born of miscalculation grinds on because neither Moscow nor NATO is willing—or able—to force a decisive end. Why did the war in Ukraine start in 2021?As in 2008 and 2012, but unlike 2017 to 2021, Vladimir Putin sensed an American president would not or could not deter him, so he invaded a former Soviet republic. Under past presidents, Putin saw no downside to grabbing Ossetia, the Donbas, and Crimea. Putin was also led to believe the West or Joe Biden would not challenge him following the recent humiliating U.S. withdrawal from...

Russian forces have surrounded the embattled Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and control 70% of it, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, but Kyiv's top general said Ukraine was pushing back hard and that fighting was raging in the city centre. Moscow has been trying to take full control of Pokrovsk, which Russians call by its Soviet-era name of Krasnoarmeysk, since mid-2024 as part of its push to take the whole of the wider Donbas industrial region. Instead of mounting a full frontal assault on the city, which used to be home to over 60,000 people and be an important logistics...

MOSCOW, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Russia's government is discussing different ways to prop up Russian Railways, the country's biggest commercial employer, which has built up a 4 trillion rouble ($50.8 billion) debt pile, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. State-owned Russian Railways, which employs about 700,000 people, has suffered a fall in revenues amid a sharp slowdown in Russia's war economy while debt costs have soared, driven by the highest interest rates in two decades. According to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, Moscow has been discussing ways...

Larry Summers, former U.S. secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University, called for the Western governments to “seize” Russian government assets held in international banking institutions to “support” Ukraine and other countries during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria aired on Sunday. .@LHSummers says the U.S. should “seize” Russian assets held in international banks & redistribute them to Ukraine & “other nations” as well pic.twitter.com/vibKS065kh — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 27, 2023 Summers framed reparations paid by the German government to the Soviet Union after World War II as a precedent for seizure of Russian government assets.

Sergei Lavrov has been sidelined by Vladimir Putin after his failure to organise a summit with Donald Trump in Budapest, according to reports. The Russian daily Kommersant, a privately owned pro-Kremlin outlet, said that Russia’s long-time foreign minister was “deliberately absent” from a key security council meeting earlier this week. The 76-year-old will also no longer represent Moscow at the upcoming G20 summit, which is scheduled for November 22 and 23 in Johannesburg. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, did not give any explanation for Mr Lavrov’s absence from the key summit, which will be attended instead by Maxim Oreshkin, Putin’s deputy...

Mamdani says NYPD boots ‘on your neck’ were ‘laced by the IDF’ in vile video Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani once made a vile, conspiracy-tinged statement tying the NYPD and the Israeli military, according to a shocking video that resurfaced Tuesday. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” the Queens assemblyman said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. Mamdani made the comparison during the 2023 Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention, where he was the keynote speaker. During a separate panel discussion titled “Socialist Internationalism: The...

Russia tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile that it said is capable of traveling thousands of miles. Trump countered that there is a U.S. nuclear submarine off Russia’s coast.President Donald Trump rebuked Russia on Monday for testing a new nuclear-capable cruise missile instead of working to end the war in Ukraine — a testy exchange that is indicative of how relations between the countries have worsened in recent weeks. Russia on Sunday announced a successful test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile called Burevestnik, which Russia says can carry a nuclear warhead and travel for more than 8,000 miles. Russian President Vladimir...

WASHINGTON — Vladimir Putin is feeling the sting of President Trump’s new oil sanctions — so much so that he dispatched one of his top henchmen on a desperate charm offensive across the US. Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin-linked financier who once served as Moscow’s backchannel to Washington, spent the weekend trying to schmooze top Trump officials and going on a media blitz. But the move failed spectacularly, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bluntly blasting Dmitriev as a “Russian propagandist,” and NATO Amb. Matt Whitaker flatly rejected his overtures — saying the administration’s energy crackdown would continue. On one of the...

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev claimed on Thursday that United States President Donald Trump, whom he described as a false peacemaker, has set himself on a "warpath" against his country by introducing new sanctions on its oil sector. "They will, of course, say he could not help but be pressured in Congress, etc. This does not change the main point: the decisions taken are an act of war against Russia," the former president wrote on Telegram. "And now, Trump has fully aligned himself with insane Europe." Moreover, Medvedev noted a "latest swing of the Trump pendulum," claiming that...

Four major state-owned Chinese oil companies have suspended their purchases of seaborne Russian oil in response to the new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Rosneft and Lukoil, according to a Reuters report, citing anonymous trade sources. The suspension, if confirmed, would put Russia under major economic pressure to end its war on Ukraine. China is a key strategic partner of Russia. Beijing's large-scale oil purchases have aided Moscow through punishing Western sanctions related to its invasion of Ukraine. The four oil firms involved are PetroChina, Sinopec, CNOOC, and Zhenhua Oil, per Reuters.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a genius. Adolf Hitler had an above-average IQ. Joe Biden is a half-wit. All three are fools who believed they could destroy Russia. The West’s failed Ukraine project has forced us to confront a bewildering array of what look like instances of stupidity, verging even on psychosis. Competent analysts like John Mearsheimer and Jacques Baud confirmed the obvious: total defeat for Ukraine has been inevitable from the get-go, yet the politicians and media kept telling us Ukraine was sure to win, and even if Ukraine lost, at least Putin could easily be removed from office. To me,...

Amid US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the Indian government is currently working on a new scheme focused on bringing back Indian-origin “star faculty” and researchers currently based abroad, according to The Indian Express. The move will not only bring the top scholars back to India, but also offer them positions in top research institutions and thus promote long-term collaboration to improve the country’s science and technology ecosystem.

The White House has hit President Putin with a “substantial” package of sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies in a sign of President Trump’s growing impatience over the war in Ukraine. Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, said last night: “President Putin has not come to the table in an honest and forthright manner, as we’d hoped.” Announcing a raft of new penalties, Bessent added: “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support...

United States President Donald Trump denounced in a Truth Social post on Wednesday a report by the Wall Street Journal of the US allowing Ukraine to strike "deep into Russia" with Western-made long-range weapons as "fake news." "The US has nothing to do with those missiles, wherever they may come from, or what Ukraine does with them!" he clarified. In the report, WSJ stated that Washington gave the green light to Kiev to attack Russia with British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles before Trump met with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last week.

Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, leading to frequent blackoutsThe Ukrainian city of Chernihiv is in total blackout following what the authorities describe as a "massive" assault by Russian missiles and drones, with hundreds of thousands of people affected.Across the wider Chernihiv region, four people are reported to have been killed as residential neighbourhoods were struck in the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi.Ten others were injured, including a 10-year-old girl.The country's most northerly region is the latest to be hit in an intensifying series of attacks on civilian infrastructure as Russia targets energy supplies, the rail network, homes and...

A planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was put on hold on Tuesday, as Moscow's rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations. A senior White House official told Reuters "there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future" after Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a "productive call" but opted against an in-person meeting. Trump had announced last week that he and Putin would meet soon in Hungary to try to bring an end...

I am continuing to prepare for President Donald Trump’s trip to Budapest, where he will meet with President Putin. In order to negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine, it is necessary to know for what Putin sent his soldiers there. To clarify, I am not asking “why,” but “what for.” Since the beginning of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, political scientists, psychologists, and other experts have attempted to explain the attack based on Putin’s psyche: his desire to prove to world leaders that he is the most powerful, his dream of being remembered as the “gatherer of Russian lands,”...

Russia reiterated its previous terms for reaching a peace deal with Ukraine in a private communique sent to the U.S. over the weekend known as a "non paper," two U.S. officials said. The communique reiterated Russia's demand that it take control of all of Ukraine's Donbas region, one of the officials said, a stance that effectively rejects U.S. President Donald Trump's current position that the frontlines should be frozen at their prevailing locations.

President Trump has denied telling President Volodymyr Zelensky he should surrender Ukraine’s entire Donbas region to Russia to end the war — but said Kyiv should give up the land already taken by Russia. Trump insisted that the two leaders “never discussed” giving up the entire region during their closed-door meeting last week, after reports claimed his White House meeting with Zelensky on Friday had descended into an explosive “shouting match.” “We never discussed that,” Trump told reporters on Sunday when pressed on whether pushed for Ukraine to accept President Vladimir Putin’s terms for a cease-fire. “We think that what...