Free Republic

The pressure building on Ukraine is not just diplomatic. While President Donald Trump pushes for a quick resolution, the churning mud of the battlefield has produced only slow and painstaking gains for the Kremlin during the four years since its full-scale invasion. From the front-line city of Pokrovsk in eastern Donetsk to Zaporizhzhia in the south and the northern region of Kharkiv, there is little doubt that Russia is making advances. ...But battlefield monitors suggest the picture is not quite so bleak for Ukraine as Trump and Putin suggest. Russia's gains are slow and incremental, won at a heavy cost...

Oliver JJ Lane18 Mar 2025525 2:51 U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak to his Russian counterpart for two hours on Tuesday as they seek an answer to a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. President Trump is believed to be in conversation with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin at time of press in a telephone call given two hours of their scheduled days. Per a Kremlin spokesman, the call was due to last from 1300 GMT (0900 U.S. Eastern) up to 1500 (1100). Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Putin, recalled in advance of today’s discussion that some discussions between the...

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is, at this point, an unelected politician ruling via Martial Law, who appears not to have understood that the world has fundamentally changed with the arrival of President Donald J. Trump. The US President is a disruptor and is ushering in a new era of peace between the nuclear powers. If Zelensky doesn’t wake up and join the effort, Trump has warned, ‘he won’t last much.’ Yesterday it arose that four senior members of Trump’s administration reportedly held secret discussions with some of Kiev’s top political opponents to Zelensky. Politico reported: “The senior Trump allies held...

I would like to reiterate Ukraine’s commitment to peace. None of us wants an endless war. Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts. We are ready to work fast to end the war, and the first stages could be the release of prisoners and truce in the sky — ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy and other civilian infrastructure — and truce...

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky's Oval Office meeting erupted into an unprecedented and blistering row. During the spectacular and extended bust up, Trump accused Zelensky of 'gambling with World War III.' Tempers flared with Vice President J.D. Vance also weighing in to give Zelensky a dressing down. The extraordinarily angry confrontation threatened to overshadow talks for a ceasefire in the Ukraine-Russia war.

You can be the best shot in the world, but your expertise won’t count for much if you run out of bullets. The same principle holds true for a country’s armed forces. Just ask the U.S. Navy. It’s getting low on munitions—yet the Pentagon is refusing to ask for sufficient supplies to replace them.

In a rare admission, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Friday that Russia is sustaining “significant losses” in the war on Ukraine. “In recent days, we have seen significant losses in Ukraine, they exceed the classical figure,” he said, according to the Kremlin. The Russian president also confessed that Russian forces were dealing with artillery problems, adding in his remarks that “Yes, we still do not have enough of these modern weapons, but the defense industry, the country's military-industrial complex is developing rapidly.” The dispirited comments about Moscow’s prospects in the war come just as Ukraine has launched a series of...

America’s neocon citizens with Ukrainian roots are currently trying to push Ukraine into a Spring offensive everyone knows will be a massacre just to cover their own asses, so they will have an excuse to cut and run in time for the coming Presidential election. Given the disgraceful alliance between a Federal regime risking nuclear war with no proper authority from the American people and what used to be a press, which is now little more than the government’s collaborator in suppressing the facts of what is happening, the American people have NO IDEA what is going on in their...

If you’re expecting massive tank battles fought across a wide front, prepare to be disappointed. Ukrainian government and military leaders have acknowledged that a counteroffensive in the Kherson oblast has started, and evidence is mounting that the operation is gaining momentum. The dictionary defines counteroffensive as “an attack made in response to one from an enemy, typically on a large scale and for a prolonged period.” For many, the word counteroffensive conjures up images from World War II and the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes or the Red Army’s response to Germany’s Operation Bagration near Minsk. Prepare to...

The House on Tuesday night voted 368-57 to pass nearly $40 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine to fight against Russia's invasion.

Hi guys! I am glad to see you again on my channel! In this video, we gonna visit a grocery store and check prices after 2 months of the war in Ukraine. We'll also make a grocery shopping and check how much we spent and how prices changed.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OdOkOmmX3A

As the Czech Republic continues to arm Ukraine, Russia has told the country that it cannot transfer Soviet-made weapons without its consent. hrough a diplomatic letter, Russia has warned the Czech Republic against supplying other countries with weapons of Soviet origin without its consent, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský told journalists this afternoon. Lipavský called the Russian demand "nonsense," and said the Czech Foreign Ministry would not react to it. There is no clause banning re-export of weapons from the former Soviet Union, he added. Earlier this week, Russia officially warned the United States and other countries that supporting Ukraine...

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Russian ally Serbia took the delivery of a sophisticated Chinese anti-aircraft system in a veiled operation this weekend, amid Western concerns that an arms buildup in the Balkans at the time of the war in Ukraine could threaten the fragile peace in the region. Media and military experts said Sunday that six Chinese Air Force Y-20 transport planes landed at Belgrade’s civilian airport early Saturday, reportedly carrying HQ-22 surface-to-air missile systems for the Serbian military. The Chinese cargo planes with military markings were pictured at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla airport. Serbia’s defense ministry did not immediately respond...

Crimea was left without electricity supplies from Ukraine on Sunday after pylons carrying power lines to the Russia-annexed peninsula were blown up overnight. It was not immediately clear who had damaged the pylons, but a Russian senator described the move as an "act of terrorism" and implied that Ukrainian nationalists were to blame. Crimea receives the bulk of its electricity from the Ukrainian mainland and its seizure by Russia last year prompted fury in Kiev and the West, which then imposed economic sanctions on Russian companies and individuals. Russia's Energy Ministry said emergency electricity supplies had been turned on for...

FULL TITLE: 'Blood oozed through the soil at grave sites. You could see the pits move, some of them were still alive': The secrets of Ukraine's shameful 'Holocaust of Bullets' killing centre where 1.6million Jews were executed WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Seventy years on from the end of the Second World War the full, shocking scale of the Nazi-inspired Holocaust in Ukraine is finally being revealed - thanks to pioneering work by a French Catholic priest to research the truth of the industrial-scale killing. Around 2,000 mass graves of Jewish victims have been located where men, women and children were shot...

When Russia annexed Crimea, the Kremlin installed a reputed gangster known as "the Goblin" to run the peninsula. When Moscow's agents abducted Estonian law enforcement officer Eston Kohver, they used a mafia-run smuggling ring to set him up. And of course, organized crime groups have played a prominent role in the Moscow-instigated conflicts in Transdniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Donbas. It has become something of a cliche to call Vladimir Putin's Russia a "mafia state." But cliche or not, the term actually fits. Not just because the Kremlin and organized crime groups are closely linked. And not just because Moscow...

The Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk says Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down and called it an international crime which must be investigated by the international tribunal in the Hague. The Boeing 777 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, carrying 298 people, when it crashed in rebel-held territory on Thursday. The two sides in Ukraine's civil conflict have accused each other of shooting the jet down with a missile. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said that Ukraine bore responsibility for the tragedy.

Ukraine has warned that the conflict in Crimea has entered a "military stage" after troops stormed an army base in Simferopol, killing one soldier. The soldier, identified by the defence ministry as warrant officer S. V. Kakurin, died after being shot in the neck when gunmen attacked the compound. Regional defence ministry spokesman Vladislav Seleznyov said a second soldier was wounded in the attack. Mr Seleznyov did not specify whether the base was stormed by Russian soldiers or pro-Kremlin militia patrolling the area. Witnesses said there was no immediate evidence that Russian soldiers were responsible for the attack. However, Ukraine's...

Know your enemy is a great axiom of war - and politics. Whatever we may think of Putin's despotic rule, it is hard not to admire his ability to continually run strategic rings around Western leaders. As the West's leaders meet to consider how best to 'influence' Russia to leave the Ukraine, they are resigned to considering economic sanctions as the only real option available. They are wrong. Further, their view is predicated on the belief that Putin genuinely believes in the need to reinstate Ukraine's pro-Russian democratically elected president and protecting the indigenous Russian population. Hence, the public explanation...

Ukraine's acting president said on Thursday a referendum planned by the pro-Moscow parliament in Crimea on joining Russia was illegitimate, and declared it a farce and crime organized by the Russian military. In a short televised address, Oleksander Turchinov said the Ukrainian parliament would start procedures to dismiss the Crimean assembly and block the referendum.