Free Republic

A general in Russia has been fired after he was accused of faking reports of battleground successes in Ukraine. Colonel General Gennady Anashkin had been the commander of the Russian Army's 'Southern Group' which is fighting in eastern Ukraine. A Russian military blogging channel, Military Informant, has claimed that 'false reports about supposedly deep successful breakthroughs' started to come from Siversk close to where Anashkin's soldiers are fighting Ukraine. -snip- His alleged sacking comes after a top Russian general was allegedly killed by British Storm Shadow missiles on November 20. The strike launched by Ukraine wiped out Lt-Gen Valery Solodchuk...

Ukrainian forces in a priority section of the front line near Avdiivka appear to have defeated a large Russian mechanized assault involving tanks and fighting vehicles over the weekend. -snip- On March 30, Ukrainian troops outside occupied Avdiivka fought off a Russian battalion-sized mechanized assault, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said. ISW cited a Ukrainian serviceman who, on March 31, said that elements of Russia's 6th Tank Regiment sent 36 tanks and 12 BMP infantry fighting vehicles into a battle on the front line near Tonenke, a village east of Avdiivka. The serviceman said...

On the eve of the Copenhagen – University of East Anglia summit on climate change, the Russians are believed to have launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of holding nuclear warheads. Now we know that this is the explanation behind the “mysterious lights” over Norway. Dubbed a failure by military standards, it is interesting to note the timing of this act. (1) Putin has much to lose over the economic and financial effects of international regulation forced upon Russia, and virtually all countries bound by this so-called pseudo-science. By boycotting the panel and then stealing the spotlight by launching weapons,...

No Mystery Here. You don’t need a convoluted device to explain Alexander Litvinenko’s demise. The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, renegade Russian spy and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin’s government, is everywhere being called a mystery. There is dark speculation about unnamed “rogue elements” either in the Russian secret services or among ultra-nationalists acting independently of the government. There are whispers about the indeterminacy of things in the shadowy netherworld of Russian exile politics, crime and espionage. Well, you can believe in indeterminacy. Or you can believe the testimony delivered on the only reliable lie detector ever invented — the deathbed...

Visiting Birobidzhan is like slipping with Alice through the looking glass. The streets are clean, the people are smiling, prosperity is in the air, yet everything is topsy-turvy. Birobidzhan, population 80,000, is the capital of Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, proclaimed in 1928 by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a national homeland for the Jewish people. It is 8,000 kilometers east of Moscow, the heart of the Russian Far East, eight time zones from the former Pale of Settlement – a city where Yiddish is a living language, yet less than five percent of the population is Jewish. Cultural confusion is...