Free Republic

Ukraine is seeking an additional $20 billion in military funding from its allies to cement what it sees as its ​current battlefield advantage over Russia, a Ukrainian defence source said on Friday. The request will ‌be made next Thursday at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an alliance of more than 50 countries also known as the Ramstein group that provide financial and military aid for ​Kyiv. Russia's advances have slowed this year - effectively grinding to a halt last ​month - as Ukrainian mid-range drone strikes have harmed its supplies and ⁠logistics for the front line. Long-range...

Strongman Vladimir Putin was forced to halt his annual Russia Day showcase in Moscow’s Red Square for the first time in 23 years Friday, after a Ukrainian attack battered key energy targets and sparked massive fires on Russian soil. Kyiv launched drone strikes overnight into Friday on critical Russian energy and transportation points, including the Armiansk Bridge, which connects occupied Crimea with the motherland. The bombing of the bridge “completely paralysed” a key logistical route and destroyed about 50 vehicles carrying fuel and ammunition, according to Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Regiment Da Vinci. Moscow’s centerpiece Russia Day concert was hastily...

A sanctioned Russian LNG tanker from the Portovaya project idled near Singapore in May 2026 with no buyer. At the same time, Ukrainian drones had already knocked roughly 700,000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity offline across 16 major facilities. Europe had locked in a binding legal phase-out of Russian gas. And just four months earlier, U.S. forces had captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

The European Union announced it would resume membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova on Monday. “All member states agreed to open the first accession negotiations cluster with Ukraine and Moldova,” EU President Antonio Costa said in a social media post on Friday. The announcement came after the new government in Hungary agreed to drop its longstanding veto against Kyiv. The European Union formally opened entry negotiations with Ukraine back in June 2024, kickstarting a complicated undertaking that usually takes years and involves negotiations on anything from agriculture to the rule of law. Launched as a powerful statement days after Russia’s...

Gavin Newsom is set to drop a bombshell tell-all interview with former President Biden’s son Hunter Friday morning. The California governor released a teaser clip from the sit down on X on Thursday afternoon, where he jokingly introduced his guest as: “Presidential candidate Hunter Biden.” Biden, in a clip of the podcast appearance obtained by TMZ, joked back. “Here’s the deal. I’ll run, but only as your VP,” he told Newsom. Biden said his reasoning was that the vice president’s residence “is a lot cooler” than the White House, he joked. The “promise” to run as Newsom’s VP came after...

French President Emmanuel Macron said on June 10 that it is "very important" for President Volodymyr Zelensky to attend the upcoming Group of Seven (G7) summit. Zelensky's participation "is very important for us because we need to rebuild consensus within the G7 in support of Ukraine on the various aspects of the war," Macron said at the Elysee Palace during a pre-summit discussion with civil society representatives. The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States will convene at the G7 Summit in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains from June 15-17. Macron's invitation...

April 20 — At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multi-million dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS. One year after his fall, U.S. officials say they have evidence, some in cash, that Saddam diverted to his personal bank accounts approximately $5 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. In what has been described as the largest humanitarian aid effort ever undertaken, the U.N. Oil-for-Food program began in 1996 to help Iraqis who were suffering under sanctions imposed following the first Gulf War. The program allowed Iraq to sell...

A car bomb killed a senior Russian defense official outside Moscow early Tuesday, June 9. Around 5:30 a.m., a BMW X3 exploded near Koldunova Street in Balashikha’s Aviatorov neighborhood as the driver pulled out of a parking space. Bystanders reached the driver while he was still alive, but he died at the scene. The Russian federal Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office for the Moscow region confirmed an explosion had taken place in Balashikha but did not name the victim. The Investigative Committee said a criminal case had been opened but did not disclose the charge. VIDEO AT LINK............. Several...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday he had a "positive" conversation with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and praised what he called their readiness to work on a settlement of the Ukraine war in the coming weeks. "A very positive conversation," Zelensky said on the Telegram messaging app about the conversation during a stopover in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. "Grateful for the readiness to work as actively as possible already in the weeks to come to give a boost to diplomacy for ending Russia's war against Ukraine," he wrote.

The leaders of Ukraine and its close European allies - the UK, France and Germany - have set out out five conditions for reaching a "just and lasting" deal to end the war with Russia. In a joint statement after talks in London, Volodymyr Zelensky, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said they would "stand firmly with Ukraine". The five conditions include a stop to the fighting, starting negotiations from the current position in the field as well as "robust" security guarantees for Ukraine. The leaders reiterated the need for the...

Volodymyr Zelensky has warned Vladimir Putin that Ukraine is "very close" to producing a ballistic missile that could be fired into Russia. The statement came ahead of talks with Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Germany over how to bring an end to the long-running war. "During several years of the war and massive attacks, we learned, we studied and we produced… we produced a lot of different drones and missiles, we still don't have ballistics, but we are now on the way, we are very close," the Ukrainian president told Sky News. Mr Zelensky is the...

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrived on Sunday afternoon in London for talks with the leaders of Britain, Germany and France as Europe considers taking a more active role in peace talks with Russia after more than a year of unsuccessful U.S. mediation. Ukraine and its European allies see a new opening to revive talks that have stalled as Moscow made uncompromising territorial demands and Washington shifted its focus to the war with Iran. They note that Russia’s recent battlefield setbacks and mounting economic strains could make a peace settlement more appealing to the Kremlin, a scenario that is also...

The hall at St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Calgary is packed. Three gigantic, artistically painted wooden Easter eggs dominate the stage. Heavily accented voices rise and fall amid the chatter as attendees nibble on poppyseed cake and other Ukrainian delicacies. No one wears the bright blue-and-yellow of the war's early days, but embroidered vyshyvanky peek from under sweaters and jackets. These are the faithful still committed to Ukraine's cause. They came to hear Michael Bociurkiw — a Canadian journalist of Ukrainian heritage now based in Odesa — deliver a sobering assessment of a war grinding into its fifth year....

Vladimir Putin has rejected an offer from Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold a face-to-face meeting, insisting instead that Russia will achieve its war goals in Ukraine, including seizing all of the eastern Donbas region. Speaking at the St Petersburg economic forum, the Russian president described the open letter from his Ukrainian counterpart containing the offer as rude. He refused to use Zelenskyy’s name, referring to him only as its author. Asked if they could meet to discuss an end to the conflict, Putin replied: “So far I see no point.” Zelenskyy’s letter, which was published on Thursday, proposed a meeting in...

Russia has a problem it cannot bomb its way out of. For months, Ukraine has been quietly dismantling the one road that keeps Russia's southern war machine alive — a highway so critical that without it, Crimea starves, and the front line goes cold. On May 27th, Kyiv stopped being quiet about it. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov formalized what had been a covert campaign into a declared strategic program, announcing a $113 million initiative he calls a "logistics lockdown." The target is the R-280 highway — also known as the M-14, renamed by Russian occupation authorities the "Novorossiya" route....

Keir Starmer will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz for talks in Downing Street on Sunday to discuss support for Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader will visit the UK with the French president and German chancellor after a week of heightened hostilities and Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal of face-to-face talks on Moscow’s war. The three countries meeting the Ukrainian leader are some of Kyiv’s staunchest allies. The UK and France are leading the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process. A large-scale Ukrainian drone attack targeted St...

Ukraine launched one of its largest drone offensives of the war overnight into June 6, sending more than 400 unmanned aircraft deep into Russian territory and striking targets that included a naval weapons depot near Saint Petersburg, an oil refinery in Siberia, a port in Russian-occupied Mariupol, and munitions warehouses in the Leningrad region. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses shot down 376 of the incoming drones, a figure that, if accurate, still left dozens reaching their intended targets across a geographic spread stretching from the Baltic coast to western Siberia. The attacks came on the final day of...

Russian military vehicles are being painted with vivid stripes to baffle AI systems of Ukrainian-launched drones, experts say. Now the "cloaking" tactic has apparently launched a high-stakes game of hide and seek on the highways of Russian-held territory in Ukraine. Todd E. Humphreys, an aerospace and AI expert at the University of Texas at Austin, agrees the paint tactic may be more effective than many realize. "Dazzle paint pushes the vehicles 'out of distribution' -- they no longer look, to the AI classifier, like the images it was trained on," he told RFE/RL. But any specific paint job would have...

The Republican-led House on Thursday passed a sweeping security package providing new military aid to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia, delivering a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, who opposed the measure. Eighteen Republicans crossed party lines to support the Democrat-authored legislation in a vote of 226-195. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent who caucuses with Republicans, also supported the legislation. Meanwhile, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was the lone Democratic lawmaker to vote against the bill. House GOP leadership and the vast majority of Republicans opposed the legislation aimed at bolstering Ukraine's defenses amid a surge in Russian missile...

Former President Joe Biden "truly changed his mind" on pardoning his son Hunter — who was convicted on federal gun and tax charges in 2024 — according to former first lady Jill Biden. Shortly after Hunter's conviction, President Biden publicly said "I will not pardon him" and then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly told the press that a pardon or commutation was off the table. But in the final weeks of his presidency, Biden signed a full and unconditional pardon for his son. On NPR's Newsmakers video podcast, Jill Biden told All Things Considered Host Scott Detrow that then-candidate...