Free Republic

By now, everyone that’s paying attention has come to the same conclusion about the war in the Ukraine: Russian forces have the decisive upper hand, and if Kiev doesn’t sue for peace soon, the likelihood is that it will lose even more of its territory – may even cease do exist. This is a hard truth for the Western apparatus, but it has steadily been gaining ground, as the hyped counteroffensive has not yielded any gains, and the military capabilities of NATO countries begin to get overextended with the looming possibility of conflict in Taiwan, in Korea, in Africa… And...

@mtracey Hannity opens his show tonight essentially berating Biden to launch World War III, accuses him of "emboldening" Putin if he doesn't retaliate for the drone incident, declares Russia, China, and Iran the new "Axis of Evil" Lindsey Graham warns, "We're gonna have World War III." Congressman Mike Waltz adds Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Venezuela are "all on the march" This isn't run-of-the-mill crazy talk, this is something next level. They're really trying to will a World War into existence Video...

French gun owners were handing over their weapons at police collection points across the country this week as part of a campaign to round up unlicensed firearms, often heirlooms lying in attics or forgotten at the back of cupboards. Gun ownership in France is nowhere near as prevalent as in the United States, for instance, and gun crimes are relatively rare, but France is keen to limit the number of illegally owned firearms - as many as six million, authorities estimate. "They were my dad's and I didn't know what do with them," Lionel said at a police station in...

A former NATO commander said that it was “highly unlikely and illogical” that Russia deliberately attacked Poland during a Tuesday MSNBC appearance in the wake of a reported missile impact.“If you’re Putin and you have decided to attack NATO, the odds of launching two random missiles into a field in Poland, that’s not how this is going to start,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, told MSNBC host Chris Jansing. “So if you had to bet right now, I think you’d bet these were errant missiles. They went astray. That will require a significant response...

Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path. No-one listened to them and here we are. The first one is George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy. As soon as 1998 he warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia". Then there's Kissinger, in 2014 He warned that "to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country"...

"Our doctrine rests on the fundamental interests of the nation," Macron told France 2 on Wednesday. "They are defined clearly and wouldn't be directly affected at all if, for example, there was a ballistic nuclear attack in Ukraine, in the region."

The Washington Post is leading tonight with a piece about how Biden is warning Russia not to use battlefield nukes in Ukraine. … Gosh, you think?! My God. Is there nobody eager to step in and try to get Ukraine and Russia to the peace table? It's good that Russia got its nose bloodied hard, but can we please put a stop to this before it gets out of hand? At the UN yesterday, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that unnamed Western countries that are militarily backing Ukraine -- that would include the United States -- are seen by...

An estimated 70,000 people protested in Prague against the Czech government on Saturday, calling on the ruling coalition to do more to control soaring energy prices and voicing opposition to the European Union and NATO. Organizers of the demonstration from a number of far-right and fringe political groups including the Communist party, said the central European nation should be neutral militarily and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.\ Police estimates put the number of protesters at around 70,000 by mid-afternoon. The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially...

President Biden on Friday declined to rule out Ukraine having to cede part of its territory to Russia in order to end Moscow’s more than three-month-old invasion.“Does Ukraine have to cede territory to achieve peace?” a reporter asked Biden after his remarks on the May jobs report.“But it appears to me that at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement

French President Emmanuel Macron said it is vital that Russia is not humiliated so that when the fighting stops in Ukraine a diplomatic solution can be found, adding that he believed Paris would play a mediating role to end the conflict. Macron has sought to maintain a dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February. His stance has been repeatedly criticised by some eastern and Baltic partners in Europe, as they see it as undermining efforts to pressure Putin to the negotiating table. "We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting...

No way out other than surrender

Since May 16, a total of 2,439 Azov Nazis and AFU servicemen blocked inside the plant have laid down their arms and surrendered during the operation. Today, the last group of 531 militants surrendered. {1398 had surrendered in earlier days at Ilyich plant, largely marines)

After insisting their forces would "fight to the death," Ukraine has ceded control of the major city to Russia.

Hundreds of Ukrainian fighters trapped for more than two months in the vast Azovstal steel works have surrendered to their Russian besiegers after their commanders finally called time on the defense of Mariupol. A total of 264 soldiers, 53 of them badly wounded, were taken in a convoy of buses to two towns held by Russian-backed rebels in the Donetsk area, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. It is unclear how many more are left in the steelworks, where as many as 1,000 fighters had been holed up in a network of underground tunnels and caverns in a medieval siege. (snip) Russia...

If you just followed news reports on Ukraine, you might think that the war has settled into a long, grinding and somewhat boring slog. You would be wrong. Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day. For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. Take the two high-profile leaks from American officials this past week about U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war: First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians...

During a Tuesday interview with state media, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that if the U.S. and other Western allies of Ukraine continue to provide the country with weapons, the risk of the war escalating into a nuclear conflict “should not be underestimated.” CBS News reported that Lavrov said that by providing weapons to Ukraine, NATO countries were “pouring oil on the fire” and risking “World War III.” Lavrov said that by providing weapons to Ukraine, NATO nations were already “in essence engaged in war with Russia.” The Russian diplomat’s warning came as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin...

Good God, I hope everyone in Congress recognizes what this bill, which apparently has now passed and Biden will sign it (seeing as he asked for it directly), means.Let's recap. Per our Constitution the military is under civilian control. That is, the actions of the military, including weapons used by same or suitable for same, are under the control of Congress and The Executive.Congress must authorize anything that leads to expense, and such must come from The House. Again, this is basic Constitution stuff.Now Congress has explicitly authorized, and Biden will sign, this bill that specifically permits the transfer to...

KYIV, April 21 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the biggest battle of the Ukraine war on Thursday, declaring the port of Mariupol "liberated" after nearly two months of siege, despite hundreds of defenders still holding out inside a giant steel works. In a televised meeting with his defence minister inside the Kremlin, Putin said there was no need for a final confrontation with the last defenders who were boxed in after surviving nearly two months of Russia's siege. "I consider the proposed storming of the industrial zone unnecessary," he told Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu in a televised...

Russia took military action against Ukraine in order to change a post-Soviet Union "world order" in which the U.S. and NATO have become dominant global forces, Russia's ambassador to the U.S. said. Anatoly Antonov justified his nation's "special military operation," the term the Kremlin uses to avoid calling the invasion a war, by saying it is meant to halt the West's expanding dominance worldwide, according to an interview published Monday by Politico. "It's a very narrow approach to say the 'Russian invasion of Ukraine,'" the ambassador told the news outlet. "We are talking about changing the world order that was...

...and the reasons why there is less space for any debate or dissent since at least 2002: [link to deBoer article at URL and below]