Free Republic

...consciously or unconsciously, Zelenskiy has already learned much of what this history has to offer, whereas Vladimir Putin has demonstrably not. 1. leave strategy to your most talented generals. This is a warning Joseph Stalin did not heed. At the start of 1942, and despite having no military training, he ordered a major offensive against the German army around Kharkiv in Ukraine. More than 250,000 Red Army soldiers were lost as a result of the disastrous Kharkov operation. It was a defeat that was all the more humiliating because the Red Army had outnumbered the Germans on the battlefield. Putin,...

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, meanwhile, gleefully predicted that Europeans would be “freezing in their homes” because they hadn’t thought through the consequences of throwing their support behind Ukraine. “The cold is coming soon,” he said, menacingly, in June last year. But as the European Union enters the last month of the meteorological winter in 2023, signs are becoming clearer that its members have weathered an historic crisis – and not just because “General Frost” has proved a milder adversary than Medvedev predicted. Within eight months of Russian troops setting foot on Ukrainian soil, the bloc of 27 European states...

While Germany’s Olaf Scholz was dragging his feet over tanks for Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland gained moral ground ...reports from Berlin indicate that, far from being apologetic about his dithering, Scholz believes that he has acquitted himself well. He kept his Social Democratic party united on a profoundly controversial question. He also persuaded the Americans to supply their tanks alongside Germany’s. Sadly, much of this positive narrative is wishful thinking, for it ignores both the abrupt collapse of Germany’s influence in Europe and the continent’s profound strategic transformation because of the Ukraine war. The decision to supply Ukraine...

There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis. Thunberg’s takedown clearly stung Tate, who 10 hours later tweeted out a pompous video in which he tried to reassert his masculinity and status by blathering on in a dressing gown, with a cigar and a pizza box as props. Not long after that, he and his brother...

Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone. “No one feeds us anything, mum,” he complained. “Our supply is s**t, to be honest. We draw water from puddles, then we strain it and drink it.” Russian forces had been on the back foot in the Donetsk oblast for weeks. Lyman, taken by the Russians in May, was liberated by Ukrainian forces in October. Two days before Andrey made his afternoon...

Moscow has said no “Christmas ceasefire” was on the cards after nearly 10 months of war in Ukraine, with fighting looking set to drag on through the winter. ...Zelenskiy had called on Russia this week to start withdrawing its troops by Christmas as the first step towards a peace deal, but Peskov said on Tuesday there would be no peace with Kyiv until Zelenskiy accepted the “realities” on the ground – referring to Russian control over parts of four Ukrainian regions it annexed in September following coercive and illegal “referendums”. After a series of lightning Ukrainian counteroffensives, Kyiv has regained...

Swiping, benching, ghosting… Dating apps can be so cold. Now that disgruntled singles are realising the best way to meet someone is in real life, will a new world of ‘offline dating’ bring people back togethercan’t remember how we started talking, only that we were sitting on the rooftop of a friend’s house with the fake leather of the sofa underneath us tacky on the back of my thighs. He wasn’t my usual type. In his vintage football shirt and mullet he looked a bit like an art school student, but he was funny enough to make up for it....

At 5am on Wednesday Serhii Melnikov heard a noise outside. The Russian soldiers who were living in the house opposite – were packing up to leave. They had occupied the village of Mylove in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region for eight months. Now they were off, as part of a humiliating pull-out from the right-bank of the Dnipro river. “Vladimir Putin said Russia would be here for ever. In the end they left in five minutes and ran away like goats,Putin wanted to kill us. He’s ended up destroying his own country. Russia’s retreat from Kherson is an enormous failure.” ...The...

Conservative cleric and a newspaper editor openly critical of government’s stance on weapons it supplied to Moscow An internal rift over the supply of deadly drones to Russia for use in Ukraine has opened up in Iran, with a prominent conservative cleric and newspaper editor saying Russia is the clear aggressor in the war and the supply should stop. A former Iranian ambassador to Moscow has also hinted the foreign ministry may have been kept in the dark both by the Kremlin and the Iranian military. Iran has denied for more than two months that it sold the drones to...

Hours after Aleksei Agafonov arrived in the Luhansk region on 1 November as part of a battalion of new conscripts, his unit were handed shovels and ordered to dig trenches throughout the night. Their digging, which they took turns to do because of the lack of available shovels, was abruptly interrupted in the early hours of the next day as Ukrainian artillery lit up the sky and shells started raining down on Agafonov and his unit. “A Ukrainian drone first flew over us, and after that their artillery started to pound us for hours and hours, nonstop,” Agafonov, who survived...

Things are disappearing in the Ukrainian city of Kherson at a rapid rate. Some are physical objects. Russian troops are taking away ambulances, tractors and stolen private cars. Cultural things are going too: archives, and paintings and sculptures from the art and local lore museums. Even the bones of Catherine the Great’s friend and lover, Grigory Potemkin, have been grubbed up from a crypt in St Catherine’s cathedral and spirited away. Russian soldiers are ferrying this loot across the Dnieper river, to the left bank of the Kherson region. They have also been deporting local citizens under the guise of...

The new commander of the Russian army in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin, said on Tuesday that civilians were being “resettled” from the Russian-occupied southern city of Kherson, describing the military situation in Ukraine as “tense.” “The enemy continually attempts to attack the positions of Russian troops,” Surovikin said in his first televised interview since his appointment last week, adding that the situation was particularly difficult around the occupied southern city of Kherson. “Further actions regarding Kherson will depend on the developing military and tactical situation, which is not easy, and difficult decisions cannot be ruled out,” he said.

Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead. “We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.” That place was Lysychansk, one of the most...

At least 11 people were killed and 15 more wounded at a military training ground in the Belgorod region in south-western Russia on Saturday when two volunteers opened fire on other troops, the Russian defence ministry has said. .. According to Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to the police, the shooting took place at 10am local time during shooting practice. Saturday’s mass shooting points to growing tensions among Russia’s troops, issues that have plagued its army since the start of the war. The incident also comes as tens of thousands of newly drafted Russian men are sent...

Western officials are engaged in “prudent planning” behind the scenes to prevent chaos and panic in their home countries in the event Russia was to detonate a nuclear bomb in or near Ukraine. Although a nuclear crisis is considered highly unlikely, the insider said officials internationally were re-examining plans to provide emergency support and reassurance to populations fearful of nuclear escalation. Hints of the thinking emerged in a briefing by an official on Friday, who was asked if there would be measures in place to prevent panic buying or people fleeing cities en masse in fear of escalation after a...

Ukraine’s army boasted of territorial gains near the strategically vital southern city of Kherson on Wednesday as Nato allies delivered new air defence systems in the wake of Russia’s recent missile attacks across the country. After 48 hours of Ukrainian cities coming under heavy fire, the government in Kyiv could celebrate positive news from both the frontlines and its diplomatic efforts to secure ground-to-air systems. Five settlements in the Beryslav district in the north-east of the Kherson region – Novovasylivka, Novogrygorivka, Nova Kamyanka, Tryfonivka, Chervone – were said to have been taken from Russian forces over the day.(snip) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s...

Key figures including Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin are using military defeats to undermine defence chief Sergei Shoigu. Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine. The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats...

The Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea, a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular, has been hit by a massive explosion on the span that carries railway traffic. Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke. The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place around 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge, although it was not immediately clear what caused it. Some images appeared to show a...

After Russia’s chaotic retreats in Kherson – less than a week after Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian province alongside three others – the region’s Moscow-appointed governor, Kirill Stremousov, sought to calm the mood. Far from a rout, the withdrawal was a tactical “regrouping” to “deliver a retaliatory blow”, Stremousov said on Wednesday. His comments – among the first public admissions of Russia’s retreats in Kherson – attempted to mask what even many vocal supporters of the war now say: the situation is the most dire the Russian army has found itself in since the start of the invasion seven...

Two women in Russia-annexed Crimea, including Miss Crimea, have been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army by singing a patriotic Ukrainian song in a video posted on social media, local authorities have said. Olga Valeyeva, who won the Miss Crimea 2022 beauty pageant, and an unnamed friend sang the popular Ukrainian Chervona Kalyna song on a balcony. A video of the women singing was posted on Instagram ...."A video was published on the internet in which two girls performed a song that is the fighting anthem of an extremist organisation,” Crimea’s interior ministry said on Telegram on Monday. It...