Free Republic

The U.S. will provide intelligence to Ukraine for long-range missile strikes inside Russia targeting its energy infrastructure, it has been reported. Citing unnamed officials, The Wall Street Journal said that President Donald Trump had allowed the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to help Kyiv attack the sites that generate revenue for Vladimir Putin’s war machine. The United States has been sharing intelligence with Kyiv for a long time but the Wall Street Journal report, carried by other outlets, suggests that Washington wants to make it easier for Kyiv to hit energy sites that are integral to Russia’s economy. The U.S. has...

For years now, Russia has been desperately attempting to convince the world — and, indeed, itself — that it is a great power. But photo opportunities at summits, nuclear saber-rattling, boasts about BRICS and military adventurism abroad are less signs of true power than the tactics of a weak actor attempting to mask weakness — to divert attention from a crumbling empire. Behind the façade of a belligerent great power lurks a hollowing-out state, edging toward the exit of the great powers’ clubhouse. Once indisputable — in fact, during the Cold War, one of only two superpowers — Russia today...

Gerry Nolan: "Kiev’s Gleiwitz Gambit: Europe on the Edge of 1939 Redux History doesn’t just repeat — it mutates. In 1939, the world stumbled into catastrophe after Nazi operatives staged the infamous Gleiwitz incident: a radio station seized, a body left as “proof,” and a lie broadcast to justify war. Eighty-six years later, whispers from the battlefield suggest Kiev may be scripting its own Gleiwitz 2.0. Only this time, the stage is NATO’s eastern flank, the props are repurposed Geran drones, and the audience is a sleepwalking Europe. Hungarian journalists were the first to sound the alarm: several downed Russian...

The front line on the battlefield in Ukraine has grown in length to nearly 1,250 kilometers (800 miles), stretching Kyiv’s defenses, while Russian forces employ a new tactic of sending swarms of small assault groups to infiltrate Ukrainian lines, Ukraine’s top military commander says. The line of contact has grown by roughly 200 kilometers (120 miles) over the past year, and Ukrainian forces are averaging between 160 and 190 combat engagements every day with Russia’s bigger army, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a review of the battlefield situation. At the same time, Russian tactics have switched since the start of...

The 9 September events demonstrate two interlocking realities. First, the prospect of a NATO–Russia war is no longer an abstraction. Moscow has shown a willingness to test NATO directly. Second, the most likely path to such a conflict is not through deliberate escalation but through miscalculation. The means to a wider war exist; the question is which one. Technical failure, human error, or political panic could cause escalation to spiral in a single instant.

A senior Russian diplomat warned Thursday that increasing Western support for Ukraine could trigger an open conflict between nuclear powers. Speaking at the U.N. conference on disarmament, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denounced the U.S. and its allies for openly declaring the goal of defeating Russia in a “hybrid” war, arguing that it violates their obligations under international agreements and is fraught with the war in Ukraine spilling out of control. Ryabkov warned that “the U.S. and NATO policy of fueling the conflict in Ukraine” and their ”increasing involvement in the military confrontation is fraught with a direct military...

Surrounded...