Free Republic

LONDON — Lines at neighboring borders and protests are just some of the scenes in Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s call for partial military mobilization. Last week, Putin ordered up to 300,000 Russians to serve in the invasion of Ukraine that began in February. Since then, thousands of citizens have fled the country to bordering nations, including Georgia and Mongolia. A satellite image of the Russia-Georgia border taken on Tuesday shows a multitude of cars and people waiting at the crossing. According to Russian state news outlet Tass, more than 5,000 cars had created the traffic jam, which was up...

An American citizen spearheading the California secessionist movement said he’ll open an embassy in Moscow this weekend as his separatist campaign looks toward Russia for recognition.Louis Marinelli, the president of the Yes California Independence Campaign, plans to open the doors Sunday to the Golden State’s first ever “embassy” in none other than the Russian capital.Mr. Marinelli, 30, has been one of the most vocal proponents in recent years of the grassroots movement dedicated towards gaining California’s independence from the United States. He’s orchestrated that campaign from abroad since at least September, however, when he relocated from San Diego to Siberia to be with...

Sanctions strengthened Putin and caused “unfriendly nations” to form a closer alliance against the West. As the West suffers from an energy crisis with no solution in sight, Russia is benefitting from this in more ways than one. You may have heard of the China–Russia East-Route Natural Gas pipeline or the Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline. Construction was approved in 2007, and in 2012, Putin ordered Gazprom to begin construction and renamed the project “Power of Siberia.” China and Russia signed a 30-year deal for $400 billion in 2014, and by December 2019, the pipeline was functional. The mainstream media focuses on the...

Artist's impression of the catastrophe. (Katrina Kenny © 2022, author provided) Some 252 million years ago the world was going through a tumultuous period of rapid global warming. To understand what caused it, scientists have looked to one particular event in which a volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia spewed huge volumes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. However, there is evidence the climate was already changing before this. Sea surface temperatures had increased by more than 6-8 ℃ in the hundreds of thousands of years leading up to the Siberian outpouring. Temperatures increased again after it, so much...

A senior Russian official finally admitted that Stalin's secret police shot dead Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of central European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. For decades the Soviet authorities insisted that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Soviet prison, but speculation about his fate grew into a full-blown mystery as gulag inmates surfaced to report sightings of the Swede in Siberia into the 1950s.

VLADIMIR PUTIN is fighting a "second front" as wildfires ravage Russia distracting resources from the Ukraine invasion as the damage spreads. Thousands of acres of Siberian forest are currently experiencing the flames causing massive destruction to the region. Areas affected include Omsk, Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk, all in Siberia, and all seeing towers of black smoke in the skies. …snip According to local official Aleksey Yaroshenko, some of the forest fires are now out of control, and are more widespread than initially reported...

An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said...Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Prior work regarding the...

Vladimir Putin has been accused of deporting Ukrainians to 'filtration' centres before forcibly taking them to remote Siberian towns after confiscating their phones and documents. 'Several thousand' people have so-far been taken, Mariupol city council claimed, before being processed through 'filtration camps' and sent to 'remote cities' in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free. -snip- Russian news agencies have reported that buses carrying hundreds of refugees from the besieged southeastern port city Mariupol had arrived in Russia in recent days. Moscow officials also said a trainload of over 280 Ukrainians were being...

Russian politicians who voted to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk are now saying they regret their decision and have condemned Vladimir Putin's invasion. Dissent to the war is growing not only on the streets in Russia, with thousands arrested during protests, but also in parliament where dissent against the leader is rare. Three members of the Communist Party, which typically remains loyal to Putin on key issues, have spoken out against the military action, saying they did not realise what they were voting for. Vyacheslav Markhaev, a senator from Siberia, wrote on Facebook that Putin 'hid plans to...

The incident started when coal dust in a ventilation shaft caught fire on Thursday, filling the Siberian mine with smoke and killing 11. By nightfall, a failed operation to reach dozens of missing miners had turned to tragedy after several rescuers reportedly suffocated. An emergency services source told one news agency "no one is left alive". The majority of the 285 people in the the Listvyazhnaya mine, in the Kemerovo region some 3,500km (2,175 miles) east of Moscow, escaped in the immediate aftermath of the incident, at around 08:35 local time (01:35 GMT) on Thursday. Officials said 49 had been...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....

A government-sponsored program, One Hectare in Siberia, provides free distribution of real estate, about 2.5 acres, to anyone who would put it to use, and after a five year period the land is converted into one’s private property. There had been no church in the village of Kotikovo, Khabarovsk Province. The residents had little chance to build one – but when this program was put into effect, they procured a lot in the village center with an abandoned building on it and set out to make it their church. Today, the renovation is over, the new roof and dome are...

The astonishing video of a humble domestic cat winning a territory battle with a young brown bear was filmed on 31 July by a group of fishermen in the north of Irkutsk region. The friends were having a party after a day on the Angara River near Ust-Ilimsk, when a brown bear approached their camp. The predator was several metres away from the campfire, when cat Vasily, or Vasya, taken along on the trip as a companion, pounced forward and stood between the humans and the bear. The video filmed by angler Sergey Tarasov shows the puffed up cat with...

The mummified remains of two cave lion cubs were discovered in Russia, and the recently unveiled specimens may be the best examples of cave lion mummies in the world. Boris, the male cub, was found in 2017 when Boris Berezhnev, a local resident and licensed mammoth tusk collector, was searching for mammoth tusks along the Semyuelyakh River in Siberia. The cub is around 43,448 years old. Just a year later in 2018, a female cub was found about 15 meters away. Researchers named her Sparta, and she is roughly 27,962 years old. Both cubs were discovered around 10 to 12...

Asteroid Day this year, June 30, 2021, is 113 years after the Tunguska impact event in Siberia, which destroyed an area of pristine forest the size of Tokyo. With blasted and burnt tree trunks leveled and stripped bare over such a vast area, it is as though a large atomic bomb had been dropped on the forest. The debate still goes on in the research literature, but a popular theory is that this impact was caused by a small comet fragment, in the region of 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter, that exploded at an altitude of around 5 miles...

One of the revived rotifers. (Michael Plewka) For tens of thousands of years, a microscopic creature lay frozen and immobile underground in the Siberian permafrost. Yet, when scientists thawed it out, the tiny multicellular animal didn't just revive - it reproduced, suggesting that there is a mechanism whereby multicellular animals can avoid cell damage during the freezing process and wake up ready to rumble. "Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism," said biologist Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology...

Photographer Lev Fedoseyev filmed a reindeer herd stampeding in a massive spiral in northwest Russia The deer run in a ring when threatened, putting does and fawns in the center, to confuse predators This herd, in Murmansk, was spooked by a veterinarian trying to give them their anthrax vaccinations Reindeer can run 50 miles per hour and, in spring, are known to form 'super-herds' of up to 500,000

Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world. More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artifact. As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the...

Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy's genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots. It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn't have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey. The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture....

Ice-coated outskirts, pagan New Year, roadside cafe waitresses, village schools - all this and more in local photographer Alexei Vasiliev's depiction of daily life in Russia's coldest region. Yakutia is Russia's largest region-five times the area of, for example, France. The distances between towns and villages here can stretch to 1,500-2,000 km. It is also home to the coldest place in the world, where snow can fall in June and the mercury can drop below -50C in winter. The Yakut frost and vicious mosquitoes are the stuff of legend and the subject of many online memes. Getting to Yakutia from...