Free Republic

This story is about the imminent – early to mid-May – Ukraine conflict escalation that we have forecast over the past six months. Let me start with a story that’s neither a leak sprung by the Massachusetts Air National Guard nor a White House lie nor the product of the febrile fantasy of a US State Department neocon loony – the principal story sources of the Western press these days. Visiting Berlin on Tuesday (April 18), Swiss President Alain Berset made it clear to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – with Swiss precision – that Germany will not be permitted to...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may not be able to attend when the UN Security Council meets in the United States later in April. He has not yet been granted a visa to enter the United States writes Svenska Dagbladet with reference to the Russian news agency Tass. "No visa has been issued yet. Not a single visa has been issued," Lavrov told the news agency. The Security Council has a rotating presidency, and Russia currently holds the presidency and Lavrov is the chairman. [Original text in Swedish - translation by SB]

Scott Ritter describes the paymaster system in the Country 404 military. All of that is being done with US taxpayer money of course.

Major Russian media now reporting Bakhmut in Russian handsBakhmut was the basic lynchpin of the entire ukie defensive system in the East.

A fire raged near the Kremlin yesterday as Vladimir Putin carried out secret talks with Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko. As the two leaders met, emergency services swarmed to the blaze at a defence ministry building at 19 Znamenka Street, Moscow. Dramatic footage shows smoke gushing from windows and rising into the sky. Around 50 people were evacuated, with the cause of the fire currently unconfirmed. Some reports said the section of the building on fire was a department of military property dealing with facilities across the country. No injuries were reported. As firefighters battle to extinguish the flames, Putin was...

James Olson, the spy agency's former chief of counterintelligence, said he believes the sharks are now circling for the tyrant back home in Russia. Olson said that Putin is now in a "no win" situation - with the war either devolving into a grinding statelemate, or ending with Vlad's death. He said if Putin stays in power he will never give up the war - and so the way to end it is for Vlad to be killed or ousted. Olson, who served for over 30 years in the CIA and won medals for his service, explained that things don't...

Russia has suffered around 200,000 casualties since its invasion of Ukraine The Ministry of Defence claims a 'minority' are due to non-combat causes A high number of deaths are linked to Russian soldier's alcohol consumption The UK Ministry of Defence said an 'extremely high' number of Russian troop deaths as a part of the Ukraine war are linked to alcohol abuse. Russian military forces are injuring themselves as a result of poor handling of weapons and heavy drinking, according to the ministry's morning intelligence update. Although Russia has suffered around 200,000 casualties since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of...

Russian Energy Minister Nikolai Shulginov said on Tuesday that his country has now been able to redirect all of its crude oil exports that have been impacted by Western sanctions over Ukraine to what he referred to as "friendly" countries. "I can say today that we have managed to completely redirect the entire volume of exports affected by the embargo. There was no decrease in sales," Shulginov was quoted by Reuters as saying. The Rise of BRICS There is no question that Russia’s fellow members of the increasingly influential BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Alliance have played a...

China has just completed its first trade of liquefied natural gas (LNG) settled in yuan, the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange said on Tuesday. Chinese state oil and gas giant CNOOC and TotalEnergies completed the first LNG trade on the exchange with settlement in the Chinese currency, the exchange said in a statement carried by Reuters. The trade involved around 65,000 tons of LNG imported from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange added. The French supermajor, one of the world’s top LNG traders, confirmed to Reuters that the trade involved LNG imported from...

Former President Donald Trump bashed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as “ignorant and foolish” on Wednesday for his attitude toward Russia, a posture Trump believes “makes it impossible to negotiate peace.” At the top of the video, Trump referenced DeSantis’s comments from an interview last week with Fox Nation’s Piers Morgan. DeSantis told the British commentator that Russia is “basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons,” a sentiment that echoed the rhetoric of failed 2012 Republican presidential candidate Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) and failed 2008 GOP presidential candidate late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), as Breitbart News reported.

A month after Russia informed the U.S. that it is suspending participation in the last remaining nuclear pact between the two countries, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday that Moscow is now refusing to hand over data on its nuclear warheads, due at the end of this week. In response, the U.S. will not provide Russia with data on its deployed strategic warheads, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said on Capitol Hill. Plumb told a hearing of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Strategic Forces that the U.S. had pressed the Russians on the issue...

Vladimir Putin's commanders are forcing his conscript soldiers at gunpoint to remain at the frontline. They are using a brutal Stalin tactic to prevent Russian reservist troops leaving their positions, say men who have seen the horror of the cannon-fodder killing fields. 'People are abandoned in the trenches as if homeless and littered with corpses,' complained Russian reservist draftees in a new video appealing directly to Vladimir Putin. 'Retreat-blocking detachments were set up against us and they did not let us out of positions.' They are forced at gunpoint to remain in position, a tactic used by Stalin's cruel SMERSH...

Front-line Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas region say it seems like Russia has "unlimited" artillery shells to throw at them — while they remain worried about running out by the end of the year.A new BBC video follows troops in the area, operating older Soviet-era tanks and firing at Russian enemies just 500 meters away. As the soldiers run to safety in trenches, they tell BBC it feels like Russia has been firing nonstop in the area."They have an unlimited amount of shells. They have entire warehouses full of them," one soldier, identified as Dima, said. "They could shoot all...

The U.S. National Security Council spokesman has suggested the best way for Moscow's tankers to avoid the British depleted uranium munitions being sent to Ukraine would be to retreat back across the border. London announced on Monday that it would send depleted uranium tank rounds—which are particularly effective in piercing enemy armor—along with the Challenger 2 main battle tanks being provided for Kyiv's use. The news touched off a furious reaction in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin falsely equated the munitions to nuclear weapons. NSC spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday dismissed the Kremlin's concerns about the depleted uranium munitions during...

"...The first thing to do is to tear Britain down, to wipe it off the face of the earth. And in fact, after that, everything will be over. It will be over, because it's Britain that's the main bastard. And the territory behind the puddle [the U.S.] itself as its masters," Gurulyov said..."...they'll start listening to what our president says. Right away, off the bat. They'll start to listen to what the president of the People's Republic of China is saying."

It’s been six weeks since I published a report, based on anonymous sourcing, naming President Joe Biden as the official who ordered the mysterious destruction last September of Nord Stream 2, a new US$11 billion pipeline that was scheduled to double the volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany. The story gained traction in Germany and Western Europe, but was subject to a near media blackout in the US. Two weeks ago, after a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington, US and German intelligence agencies attempted to add to the blackout by feeding the New York...

The EU is sending one million artillery shells to Ukraine at the eye-watering price of two billion Euros, meanwhile the United Kingdom has confirmed it would be sending depleted uranium anti-tank rounds along with the main battle tanks it is donating to the country. A long-anticipated arms procurement deal by EU members-plus-Norway through the European Defence Agency to procure and send one million 155mm artillery rounds [pictured, above] to Ukraine has been agreed, ending months of discussion. The €2 billion ($2.15 billion) price tag will be divided in two tranches, the EU said, with the first billion used to compensate...

A gloomy assessment of Ukraine’s prospects for victory against Russia emerged from a recent private gathering of former top US soldiers, intelligence officials and scholars with resumes reaching from the Reagan to the Trump administrations. Short of trained personnel and ammunition, one speaker argued, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might consider a Chinese peace plan, especially after Beijing’s successful mediation of the Iran-Saudi dispute. The several dozen attendees, many of whom had held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions, met under Chatham House rules, which forbid identification of individual participants but allow the content itself to be presented. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment of participants...

What’s known is that $250 billion in capital has left, equivalent to 14 percent of its GDP. One expert guesstimates that Russia’s economy has shrunk from the size of Italy’s to Chile’s in the past year — you wouldn’t know this based on bogus figures fed to the media by Moscow. Economist Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) calculates that Western sanctions alone have also “basically shrunk Russia’s economy by 10 percent”, bigger than what happened in the 2009 financial crisis. What is also known is that immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, an...

Russia's defence ministry said on Tuesday that its fighter jets did not come into contact with a U.S. drone that crashed into the Black Sea earlier, claiming instead that the drone crashed due to "sharp maneuvering". "The Russian fighters did not use their onboard weapons, did not come into contact with the UAV and returned safely to their home airfield," the defence ministry said.