Free Republic

Last year I was working on an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine... Among the people I interviewed: Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man whom the F.B.I. is investigating in what it is calling an assassination attempt... Mr. Routh, who had spent some time in Ukraine trying to raise support for the war, was seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban... There were a few complications. Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N. C., said he never fought in Ukraine himself — he was too old and had no military experience. *** When...

Jack Poso 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec BREAKING: NY Times refers to Trump assassin Ryan Routh as ‘crusader for causes large and small’ From thepostmillennial.com 11:52 AM · Sep 17, 2024

With Ukraine’s military facing mounting deaths and a stalemate on the battlefield, army recruiters have become increasingly aggressive in their efforts to replenish the ranks, in some cases pulling men off the streets and whisking them to recruiting centers using intimidation and even physical force. Recruiters have confiscated passports, taken people from their jobs and, in at least one case, tried to send a mentally disabled person to military training, according to lawyers, activists and Ukrainian men who have been subject to coercive tactics. Videos of soldiers shoving people into cars and holding men against their will in recruiting centers...

The United States is stepping up the face-to-face military advice it provides to Ukraine, dispatching a three-star general to Kyiv to spend considerable time on the ground. The Americans are pushing for a conservative strategy that focuses on holding the territory Ukraine has, digging in and building up supplies and forces over the course of the year. The United States has given vast military and economic support to Ukraine, more than $111 billion over the past two years. But a significant number of Republicans now say they oppose further spending, and others are demanding to see a new strategy before...

Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate. Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck. In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of...

A trove of leaked Pentagon documents reveals how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States, demonstrating Washington’s ability to warn Ukraine about planned strikes and providing an assessment of the strength of Moscow’s war machine. The documents paint a portrait of a depleted Russian military that is struggling in its war in Ukraine and of a military apparatus that is deeply compromised. They contain daily real-time warnings to U.S. intelligence agencies on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets. Such intelligence has allowed the United States to pass on to Ukraine...

WASHINGTON – A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail U.S. national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard. The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United...

They never had a chance. Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training. Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from a half-century ago and virtually nothing to...

Wind howled through leafless trees and through the windows of the blown-out apartment building as the surveillance team marched up flights of stairs covered with broken glass. The cold numbed their fingers as they set up their equipment: a laptop-size thermal imaging sight, its tripod and a Starlink satellite dish and battery. (snip) What unfolded over the next half-dozen hours was a routine but essential part of the daily rhythm of the war — part drudgery and part urgent calculation as the team ascertained the coordinates for enemy positions, relaying them to the Ukrainian artillery battery miles away. This type...

Russian forces appeared poised to tighten the noose around thousands of Ukrainian troops near two strategically important cities in the fiercely contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine on Sunday, mounting an assault on Ukrainian front lines that forced Ukraine to rush reinforcements to the area. On a day of fighting that put even territory thought to be securely in Ukrainian hands in play, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, warned that the war could grind on for years. They urged Ukraine’s Western allies to settle in for the long haul as Russia moved...

WASHINGTON — A white National Guard commander called the standoff in Lafayette Square “the Alamo,” implying that the White House was under siege. Black members of the D.C. Guard objected to turning on their neighbors. Army leaders told pilots to “flood the box with everything we have” as two helicopters buzzed protesters in the streets. The National Guard is now engaged in an investigation of the havoc a week ago Monday in downtown Washington, similar to after-the-fact examinations more common to battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be questions, interviews and competing narratives.

The Pentagon is considering withdrawing nearly all American commandos from Niger in the wake of a deadly October ambush that killed four United States soldiers. Three Defense Department officials said the plans, if approved by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, would also close military outposts in Tunisia, Cameroon, Libya and Kenya, as well as seven of the eight American elite counterterrorism units operating in Africa. The shift in forces is part of the Pentagon’s defense strategy to focus on threats from China and Russia. But they represent a more severe cut of Special Operations forces in Africa than initially expected, leaving...

In the hours after Sunday’s mass shooting at an Orlando night club, Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said the gunman’s weapons included a pistol and an “AR-15-type assault rifle.” On Monday night, officials clarified that the rifle Omar Mateen used in the shooting was not an AR-15, but a Sig Sauer MCX rifle. While aesthetically similar to and just as lethal as an AR-15, the MCX is internally a different beast, thus all but removing it from the AR-15 family of rifles. Yet while the weapon is different, the MCX and the AR-15 share the same design...

In significant news that has thus far either gone under or outright unreported by the media, U.S. military advisors have “boots on the ground” in Yemen, according to a recent report in the Washington Post by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Missy Ryan: “The Pentagon has placed a small number of U.S. advisors on the ground in Yemen to support Arab forces battling al-Qaeda, military officials said on Friday, signaling a new American role in that country’s multi-sided civil war. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said U.S. personnel had been in the country for about two weeks, supporting Yemeni and...

While the tweeted images have no landmarks on the ground as reference points, the Iranian state-sponsored FARS news agency released a report that Syrian aircraft bombed opposition forces in Idlib, including al-Nusra fighters on Wednesday. The possible sighting of Russian aircraft in Syrian skies comes just two days after the Jerusalem-based newspaper YNET released a report indicating that Russian pilots and aircraft would be arriving in Syria in “the coming days” with the purported mission of flying airstrikes against the Islamic State and opposition forces that are threatening the Assad regime.